This is a fairly complicated problem, but I figured I'd pick your guys' brains and see if there was a solution, or if one of my possible solutions would work.

I have almost every reverb you can get for macOS. Some of them are fairly decent, some are great and a lot of them either sound the same, sound crappy or both. Anyway, none of them -- to me, at any rate -- sound as good as the reverb I used on OS 9, Arboretum Hyperverb. Unfortunately, Arboretum went under around the same time as OS X became a thing, so a Cocoa or UB version was never developed. I've been unsuccessfully looking for a replacement ever since.

It's gotten to the point where I finally decided that my best course of action is to somehow use Hyperverb with my present-day setup. I've considered getting an OS 9 emulator, but none of them really work that well, and then there's the problem of porting audio in and out of said emulator to my DAW. JackOS might work, but since these emulators appear to take over (or can't use) audio ports on the host computer, it might not even be possible.

I could try the "Winejack" method and use Wine to run the old Windoze version, then port audio in and out with JackOS, I still have a G3 iBook with Hyperprism and a bunch of other sad and outmoded software on it, and I considered literally using my iBook as a "hardware reverb" to run live audio in and out of Hyperprism via an old FireWire audio interface that I can still use with it. There are several problems with this, as I would have to run four cables (two in and two out) for each instance of Hyperverb I'd want to use, and since that could be at least two or three instances, that's 12 cables. Then, there's the latency issue, and since we're talking about a G3 iBook and a first-gen FireWire interface, that could be a lot of latency.

My only other solution would be to somehow capture IRs from the iBook and just run the IRs inside of Altiverb or a similar program. Aside from the gain staging, which would be an issue in almost any of my scenarios, the hat trick would, again, be the latency. Hell, I'm not even sure if it's possible.

 

Have you seen this?
http://www.futurestyle.org/archives/a/arboretumHyperprism.htm

 

I haven't! I don't think it'll run on Sierra, though ... but thank you so much for posting that!

Edit: Damn, just searched around ... the tech is so old, nobody even has it available for download anymore.

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2018

To avoid gain staging problems I lower all channels, depending on the amount of channels, right from the start for about 10dB. This way single instruments normally don't go above ~20dB.
The latency shouldn't be higher than with any other reverb IR, though different pluggies surely have different latencies.
And yes it is possible. Make yourself a short impulse (sine or square wave for a fraction of a second) render the reverb, phase inverse the short impule and render both again. Common procedure, should work.

 

I was thinking more of the round-trip from my Mbox 3 Pro, out to my old iBook through my old FireWire interface, through whatever is hosting Hyperverb and back out to my MBP -- dunno if there will be any major latency or not. Otherwise, in theory, it should be just like capturing an IR from a hardware reverb.

 

Surprisingly, I wasn't able to find Hyperprism Silver or Gold (the only versions even made for OS X), but I was able to track down the free version of HyperEngine, which I believe came out around the same time and has the same system requirements. It confirmed my biggest concerns: Arboretum never made an Intel version of their software (they literally went out of business a couple of months before they were set to release their first AU version of Hyperprism), and their PPC stuff won't load on an Intel machine. I have, however, read posts on a few forums that indicate other people are working around this by using an old PPC Mac as a "hardware reverb" in an effects loop.

 

The OS X versions of Hyperprism are a lot like HyperEngine, in that they never made proper VST/AU version as far as I know. I have a demo installer somewhere in my old CDs.

Lately I have been mucking about with Sheepshaver in Linux and IMO it kind of sucks. It is very crash-happy about most things that require any real-time hardware access, including ASIO or MIDI. The devs say this is because of SDL, but I call BS since other emus use SDL and don't have this problem. I will probably try QEMU instead when I have some time to play with it.

Running OS 9 natively is definitely doable. People have recently gotten 9.2.2 running on Mac Mini G4s, which can be had for about $50 these days.

 

I can still run Hyperprism on my old G3 iBook, that's not the problem. I was hoping there was a way to run it on my current MBP and Sierra. It's funny that you mentioned Sheepsaver, as I actually tried that. It's terrible! There's actually other emulators out there, but I don't think any of them will work, either. I'd love to get my hands on a beta for the AU version of Hyperprism, which has to exist somewhere. I also contemplated trying to Winejack the DX version of Hyperprism, but it would involve me installing DX or Windoze VST plugs inside of Wine and then figuring out how to route them to my Mac DAWs.

So I'm probably left with either using my iBook as a "hardware reverb" or figuring out how to record IRs through the iBook and just using the convolution version in Altiverb or any of my other convolution reverbs.

 

I hear you. I would love an AU Hyperprism also. But even then, I doubt it's any more likely to run in Sierra than any other AUs of that era. Stuff like AirySynth and Zoyd are even a stretch to run in Snow Leopard. The easier to find OS X version they had was HyperEngine-AV, kind of a rudimentary QuickTime editor with some of their audio effects bundled into it. That you can probably find and try in 10.6 at least.

Since I have been using KXstudio in Linux, I have gotten some useful Windows VST plugs to run under WINE, but I had the rude awakening that the only Windows version of Hyperprism is a DX plug. Coming from Macs, I haven't used those, wasn't even sure if its real-time. So that is another option - JACK-> WINE-> DX/VST wrapper-> Hyperverb. Sounds convoluted but it might well work. I am probably going to try compiling one of the screamer builds of QEMU in a few weeks for retro-Mac-ery once I've got other projects off my plate.