Emulate older macOS on M1

[TerryTr]

Hello,

I would like to ask, is there any option how to emulate Big Sur (eventually older versions) on MacBook with M1 and Monterey OS?

Thank you.

 

[joevt]

Maybe UTM?
https://mac.getutm.app

For other emulation (game consoles, arcade), there's a list at
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/q0yy1t

 

[joevt]

UTM says it won't virtualize macOS except Monterey, but maybe you can Hackintosh older macOS versions.

 

[pshufd]

I'm running Big Sur on my M1 mini right now. Why not just create a bootable external drive with Big Sur on it when you want to run it?

 

[Gnattu]

I'm running Big Sur on my M1 mini right now. Why not just create a bootable external drive with Big Sur on it when you want to run it?

For later M1 Pro/Max/Ultra variants, Monterey is a hard requirement and you are not able to boot Big Sur on those machines at all.

 

[pshufd]

For later M1 Pro/Max/Ultra variants, Monterey is a hard requirement and you are not able to boot Big Sur on those machines at all.

I have both and am well aware of the requirements. But you could always just buy a cheap used or refurbished mini for a particular need. Same goes if you need to run Intel macOS. I have a 2010 iMac 27 that I paid $100 for and a 2014 iMac 27 that I paid $500 for. I used to run Monterey and the other macOS operating systems on my i7-10700 Windows build but it's just easier to buy Macs, whether new for performance or old because they are so cheap these days.

 

[thedocbwarren]

Question is, why? That can help define the need.

 

[jav6454]

Hello,

I would like to ask, is there any option how to emulate Big Sur (eventually older versions) on MacBook with M1 and Monterey OS?

Thank you.

Any reason why? Or just for fun?

 

[jdb8167]

UTM says it won't virtualize macOS except Monterey, but maybe you can Hackintosh older macOS versions.

UTM should be able to emulate older Intel versions of macOS but it is likely going to be very slow. The reason that UTM can't virtualize Apple silicon versions of Big Sur is that the project is using Apple's new MacOS virtualization libraries that are only included with Monterey. For the same reason, Parallels is also limited to Monterey with ASi.

 

[haralds]

Basilisk II and SheepShaver are VMs for 68K and PPC Mac OS 7.6 through 9.0.4. Edward Mendelson has some preconfigured versions for System 7.6.1, Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 9.0.4 that work nicely as Universal versions - http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/macos9osx.html

I have found UTM to be workable for PPC Tiger & Leopard, ok in performance, but not 100% stable.

I have had trouble running even Windows XP on Intel emulators based on QEMU. My goto is to use Parallels with ARM64 Windows 11 and its Intel runtime to deal with older Intel stuff.

 

[Loooop]

UTM works very well on both intel and silicon mac with the preconfigured version of MacOS 9.2.1 which can be downloaded from here:

Mac OS 9.2.1

Virtual machines for Mac

mac.getutm.app

 

[DominikHoffmann]

UTM works very well on both intel and silicon mac with the preconfigured version of MacOS 9.2.1 which can be downloaded from here:

Mac OS 9.2.1

Virtual machines for Mac

mac.getutm.app

Where can I find information on how to get that VM on the network and sharing files on the host system? I need to install Microsoft Word and open some old files that can no longer be opened in the most recent version of Word on M1.