Hey All, I figured this would be of interest, it's pretty frictionless to run PowerPC OSes via QEMU x86. I fully expected more problems. I haven't seen any try this but I would not be surprised if someone here already has.
The requirements are as follows:
Xcode + Xcode-select installed
x86 Homebrew installed
Disk Image of the OS you'd like to run, I used OS 9.2.1, OS X 10.0, 10.1 and 10.3
The above code is:
And a youtube vid if that's your thing:
Not really included in either is that you'll want to test out QEMU screamer, I haven't tried yet but I wouldn't surprised if it works. This is the best resource I've found.
It runs well enough, I as able to play SimCity 2000, which wasn't exactly demanding but works. QEMU runs PPC OS X about as fast as Parallels does with X86 Macs despite going through the insanity of PPC -> x86 -> ARM. For whatever reason, the VM support for OS X with Parallels is pretty clunky and choppy.
I also tried Windows 10 but already had burned enough time. It ran sloooooow but I was able to mostly install it, but it failed on the reboot.
The requirements are as follows:
Xcode + Xcode-select installed
x86 Homebrew installed
Disk Image of the OS you'd like to run, I used OS 9.2.1, OS X 10.0, 10.1 and 10.3
Code:
arch -x86_64 brew install qemu
qemu-img create -f qcow2 myimage.img 2G
qemu-system-ppc -L pc-bios -boot d -M mac99 -m 512 -hda myimage.img -cdrom path/to/disk/image
qemu-system-ppc -L pc-bios -boot c -M mac99 -m 512 -hda myimage.img
The above code is:
- Installing QEMU as x86
- Create disk image (2G = 2GB)
- Run QEMU with newly created image and report as Mac using OpenBIOS, boot of the D drive (Optical), 512 MB of RAM and also include the disk image. You'll need to format the disk. 10.0 doesn't have a disk utility in the installer so you'll need another bootable image that has one.
- After installation boot off the C drive where the OS was installed.
Running Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.0 - 10.4 on Apple Silicon (M1) & Intel via QEMU
The info this guide is valid but I written a new one about QEMU screamer which emulates Mac OS 9 - OS X 10.14 with sound.
blog.greggant.com
And a youtube vid if that's your thing:
Not really included in either is that you'll want to test out QEMU screamer, I haven't tried yet but I wouldn't surprised if it works. This is the best resource I've found.
It runs well enough, I as able to play SimCity 2000, which wasn't exactly demanding but works. QEMU runs PPC OS X about as fast as Parallels does with X86 Macs despite going through the insanity of PPC -> x86 -> ARM. For whatever reason, the VM support for OS X with Parallels is pretty clunky and choppy.
I also tried Windows 10 but already had burned enough time. It ran sloooooow but I was able to mostly install it, but it failed on the reboot.