DG vi help needed

I’m using Dragon Quest 6 (J) [T-Eng0 rom using the Snes9x emulator for mac. I’m in san marino and I’ve double checked that i’ve done everything in the walkthru but it wont let me board the ship. The guy in front of the ship keeps saying"Sorry, but we’re still loading the boat.Why don’t you look around the town and come back a little later, okay?" and the guy who sells the tickets will sell me as many passes as i want. So I looked around town and talked everyone saved in the church, slept in the inn, everything, even went out of town and battled for a while. Any ideas on how to get on that boat?
Thank you

That whole first part of the game had me stumped at various places. You might need to go back to Granmaz’s hut or some other location. I don’t exactly remember, I don’t think I had a problem.

Your ROM could be bad. I highly recommend against using any pre-patched ROM you can find. Try to get a clean original DQ6 ROM, then get the patch from NoPrgress (http://www.geocities.com/noprgress/). I dunno if Snes9x can patch on the fly like ZSNES can, but probably. If it can’t just use an IPS patcher (you’ll have to google for one that works on the Mac, I don’t know any).