I get the feeling that this may come as a surprise to some other users 
of Emacs on Panther, but I have been unable to get it to come up as a 
Carbon app, although it runs find with -nw.   Near as I can figure, for 
some reason the Carbon framework is having trouble finding the window 
resources in Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/Emacs.rsrc, even though 
ktrace shows it opening the file and reading it just before it dumps 
core.

It turns out that at least on MacOS X, there is no particular reason to 
use the Emacs.rsrc file in the first place, and I think this may be 
true of MacOS 8.5 and MacOS 9 as well.   Instead of calling 
GetNewCWindow(), which takes a resource ID, one can just call 
CreateNewWindow().   With this, Emacs starts up just fine for me.   I 
am not sufficiently familiar with MacOS classic issues to say that this 
patch should be applied as is, but I present it for your edification, 
since it solved my problem, and if it does make sense to include it, of 
course I would appreciate that.