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Its design is quite unusual because it originated as a 'native' emulator without a JIT, running application code bare-metal on a 32-bit PowerPC CPU, and some of the architectural decisions made as a result have persisted. SheepShaver's long history was attractive, though, and having networking and native filesystem support would be a huge plus, so after some alterations to the source code to make it build on POWER9, I decided to look at why it wouldn't start. I did some tinkering with adjusting refresh rates and other attempts to reduce the overhead, but it still ran abysmally bad, and I ended up abandoning it.

PearPC does build and appear to run on OpenPOWER systems, but its emulation speed is hideous the JIT is limited to x86, and without it the project estimates it runs about 500 times slower than actual performance, which certainly matches my experience with it. More to the point, at that time I couldn't get SheepShaver to run at all, even when I managed to make it compile (more about this in a moment). Neither are officially maintained anymore, and even any unofficial updates to SheepShaver appear to be intermittent and fragmented. Back in the day while using QEMU to run my old Mac applications, I explored the two other choices. PearPC, SheepShaver and QEMU are your only options right now for emulating a Power Mac.

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In addition, QEMU has decent emulation fidelity and a well-supported 'mini JIT' called TCG when KVM or other virtualizers can't or don't work, but it requires drivers on the guest OS side for device support, is slower to start up, and because of its full system emulation has non-trivial overhead for certain operations.

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QEMU originally could only boot Mac OS X, but later added support for Mac OS 9, and can accelerate running at least OS X with KVM-PR (when it's not broken), though this has some edge glitches, and KVM-PR doesn't work on early versions of OS X or with OS 9 at all.

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Other than SheepShaver and Basilisk II, other emulators include vMac's descendant Mini vMac (68K), MESS/MAME (68K), PearPC (PowerPC, an exception in that it can only run Mac OS X and various other free OSes), and of course QEMU.

To this day both emulators share substantial amounts of code. SheepShaver led to Basilisk II, which is a 68K Macintosh emulator, before itself becoming open source. The ability of SheepShaver to run Mac apps directly on the processor accounts for some of its unusual design decisions that persist even on non-PowerPC architectures either running applications through its JIT compiler (on x86 and x86_64) or with an interpreter (everything else, including aarch64 and Apple silicon). SheepShaver works on Mac OS X, too, allowing Power Macs with Leopard to run classic apps at near native speeds, though not as well integrated as the Classic Environment, of course. It achieved surprisingly good speed on modest hardware by heavily patching the operating system (more later) and running most programs as native code directly on the BeBox's twin 603 CPUs, not unlike KVM-PR, though without using any special processor features (instead, this was achieved by patching out supervisor portions of the emulated Mac ROM and running all components, including the nanokernel, in the problem state - today we would call this paravirtualization). SheepShaver started on BeOS and the PowerPC-based BeBox as a commercial product and pun on the Amiga 68K Mac emulator ShapeShifter it only runs the classic Mac OS, and only then up to 9.0.4 (later versions require an MMU, which SheepShaver doesn't implement).

This is relevant because of the current state of Mac emulation: in general, the classic Mac OS is better supported than Mac OS X. Even my G5 only ever ran Mac OS X Tiger so that I still could run Classic applications (on top of the fact I preferred Tiger's interface to Leopard). With the exception of the G5 all of these systems natively ran the classic Mac OS, so I had a large investment in classic Mac software. I upgraded from there to (briefly) a used Power Mac 7200, then traded it in for a used Power Mac 7300, then pimped that out, then a Power Mac G4 MDD, the first computer I personally bought new, and then the G5. I first touched a Mac in 1987 (it was my buddy's father's Mac Plus, and we spent hours messing around in HyperCard and System 6), though the first Mac I personally owned was a second-hand Macintosh IIsi.

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I certainly was, even granting it made commercial sense at the time, and I ended up using a Power Mac G5 Quad for 13 years as a daily driver before I got the Raptor Talos II I use now. I've always maintained (possibly by personal experience) that one of the natural future markets for OpenPOWER is one of the architecture's past markets: Power Mac users, particularly those who were irked by the Intel transition.