cosmology of kyoto is a 1993 point-and-click set in heian-era kyoto. you wander the streets and temples at night and keep running into ghosts, oni, and the buddhist afterlife. tripitaka is the harder-to-find follow-up, which only turned up recently when the one physical copy got auctioned and uploaded. both games are old enough that a modern mac can't even mount the disc images (they're HFS, not HFS+), so the way to play them is to emulate a 90s powerpc mac and run them inside that. it is a faff, but there is genuinely nothing else like these games, so it's worth it.

the emulator is sheepshaver, which pretends to be a power mac so you can boot classic mac os and run its software. the nice part: once it's set up you can throw almost any old mac game at it. i keep myst mounted on mine.

what you need

sheepshaver, the current universal build (find the forum thread).
a power mac ROM, about 4 mb. cosmology wants a power mac, i use a 9600-era dump. roms are copyrighted so track one down yourself, i'm not hosting it.
a mac os install cd as an iso. i used 8.6, macintosh repository has them.
the game iso. cosmology of kyoto as an english hybrid iso, tripitaka from the internet archive.

the process

make one folder and put everything in it: the sheepshaver app, the ROM (named exactly ROM), the install cd iso, and the game iso. add an empty folder called shared for passing files in and out of the emulated mac.

lock every iso first. get info on each one and tick Locked, which stops sheepshaver from writing to them.

open sheepshaver once so it reads the ROM. a grey screen with a floppy and a question mark means the ROM works and there's just no os yet, which is what you want. if it crashes instantly, the ROM is the problem (try naming it Mac OS ROM). now go to settings: point ROM file at your ROM, hit create to make a virtual hard disk (500 mb is plenty, name it something like MacOS8.6), set Unix Root to your shared folder, add the install cd, and set boot to any. save and quit, force quitting if it hangs.

boot again. it complains the new disk isn't readable, so initialise it as Mac OS Extended and name it. the install cd opens with an installer, run it through, wait a few minutes, and you have mac os. then back into settings: drop the install cd (you're done with it), add the game iso, reboot.

it may offer to initialise the game disc. don't, just cancel (and if you locked it, it can't anyway). the game shows up on the desktop. open it and play.

my settings

for reference, what actually works on mine: 512 mb ram, window mode not fullscreen, JIT on, graphics acceleration on, slirp networking, mac os 8.6 on a 500 mb disk, a 4 mb power mac ROM. nothing exotic, and the defaults are close.

playing cosmology

it's point-and-click, so click around and be patient with it. the name you give your character doubles as the password for your saves, so remember it. command+S saves anywhere and lets you name the save. command+Q quits back to the desktop without closing the emulator.

the icon

i made a custom icon for my emulator app, the oni and the frightened face up there, very on theme. take it if you want it: kyoto-icon.icns or the plain png. to use the icns, get info on your app, click the little icon in the top-left corner of the info window, and paste the icns over it.

last thing: this same folder trick works for basically any classic mac game. lock the iso, add it in settings, boot. half the fun is just seeing what weird abandonware still runs.

last updated 07/08/26, e. kruger