The lowercase -m is memory, expressed in megabytes, but you can use 1G or 2G for 1 or 2 gigabytes like the format utility. It's pretty esoteric, but QEMU uses OpenBIOS, and mac99 is the model for Beige G3s. For those who remember the days of yore, C is the default drive for PCs, D is the default for the CD-Rom like a PC. After that, the -boot flag declares the boot drive. This seems to be the default even in Mac QEMU. Next, we're declaring PC bios with -L pc-bios, I'm unsure if this is necessary. The first command is the qemu core emulator, you can use things like 64-bit x86 CPU qemu-system-x86_64 or a 32-bit CPU qemu-system-i386, but we're using a PPC, so we are using qemu-system-ppc. Let's break this down so it's not just magic. qemu-system-ppc -L pc-bios -boot d -M mac99 -m 512 -hda myimage.img -cdrom path/to/disk/image Now that we have a blank hard disk image, we're ready to go. qemu-img create -f qcow2 myimage.img 2G Step 3: Launching the emulated computer and the tricky part: Formatting the HDD If you'd like more space, change the size of the simulated HDD. You can get away with much less for OS X OS 9. You can specify a route, but I just used the default pathing, the 2G = 2 GB below. The rest of the steps do not need any specification for M1 vs. Apple Silicon arch -x86_64 brew install qemu x86 Intel Macs brew install qemu Step 2: Create a disk image You'll need to install the x86 version of QEMU for the Apple silicon macs first. This is the only step where Apple Silicon and Intel Macs differ. xcode-select (CLI Tools) xcode-select -install.Apple Silicon (M1) computer (or Intel) Mac.Basic understanding of the terminal in OS X/macOS.Included below is the instruction for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

I've gotten OS 10.0 and nearly gotten Windows 10 working on my M1. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to skip over installing Homebrew on an Apple M1, but you'll want to use the arch -x86_64 method, which requires prepending. I was able to play Sim City 2000 on Mac OS 9.2 at a fairly high resolution. It's surprsingly very usable but the usefulness is going to be limited. I encountered very little resistance, which surprised me as I haven't seen/read anyone trying this route. Thus far, the community has succeeded in getting QEMU to install the ARM version Windows, so I decided to do the more silly path and get PPC and X86 working on Apple Silicon. Now, this post wouldn't be very exciting if I tried this on my Mac Pro, but I decided to try it on my MacBook M1. Still, in this example, I'm using Homebrew, a package manager for macOS/OSX that allows you to install software via the CLI and manage easily. There are alternate versions and different ways to install it. It's pretty powerful, free, and has a macOS port. Unlike VMWare, it's able to both virtualize CPUs and emulate various CPU instruction sets. QEMU is an open-source emulator for virtualizing computers.

Mac os x sdkmanager create emulator