You might also want to head into Appearance applet’s Fonts tab to turn off anti-aliasing so you can enjoy the fonts in their pixel-glory. Head to the Control Panel’s Monitors applet to set the screen size/resolution you want. Just press Windows Q to quit this and get to that Platinum desktop! When it boots for the first time you’ll get a Register With Apple “wizard”. Here's a PowerMac G4 'Quicksilver' Icon (128 KB) I put together.

The command line is mostly the same just omitting the ISO and boot-from-CD options: Using our virtual Mac OS 9įinally, we want to start our freshly created machine without booting from the ISO. Now you’ll need to head to the Special menu and choose Shut Down. You can accept all the defaults or just change Volume Format to Extended - I did this just in case I want to try and mount the image on my MacBook at a later date.Ĭlicking Restore, then confirming the dialog will give you a progress bar that is comically fast for installing an operating system (via software emulation no less). Head up to the MacOS9Live CD icon, double click it then double-click on Apple Software Restore. Typically Macintosh HD is a popular choice. You might now want to click the “untitled” hard drive icon that’s appeared on the desktop, wait a few seconds and you should be able to rename it. Just close that with the top-left window control then click into the Drive Setup window, select, press the Initialize button then confirm it with the default on the subsequent Initialize window. You should now be presented after a few seconds with a ReadMe. The final item, SDL, is required because the default GTK emulation, while faster, has major problems on Windows trying to keep the mouse captured. There are many other useful config switches available for the PowerPC emulation if you need to troubleshoot or tweak.

a PowerMAC based Mac with USB support -M mac99,via=pmu.

Qemu -system-ppc -cpu 'g4' -M mac99, via = pmu -m 512 -hda c:/retro/Mac/MacOS9HD.img -cdrom 'c:/retro/Mac/Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Install.iso' -boot d -g 1024 x768x32 -device usb -kbd -device usb -mouse -sdl Now let’s create an empty hard-drive image file: (Windows won’t let you stuff it into Program Files). Creating a machine & installing Mac OS 9įirst off create a new folder to put your machine config into. They also don’t charge for their Operating Systems instead it’s “free” with the hardware and I still have a MacBook Pro 15” so I won’t feel bad about using it. While Mac OS is copyrighted this image has been up for over 6 years so I like to think Apple are turning a blind eye in that people who want to use their legacy stuff can do so without expecting support from Apple - win-win.

The nice people over at Mac OS 9 Lives have a Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Installer ISO which is pre-configured and easy to use - it also conveniently includes a few extra tools and apps you’ll need. To install Mac OS 9 we’re going to need a disk image/ISO to install from. There are “screamer” forks but the only binaries available are for Mac OS X so you’d have to build it yourself and there will probably be a whole lot of hoops to jump through. Please note that Mac sound support is missing here. You could try and build this yourself but Stefan Weil has you covered for pre-built QEMU Windows binaries This is a shame as although I love the command-line for its scriptability when it comes to exploring valid combinations of options the command-line is mostly awful (the IBM AS/400 command-line and prompting system excluded). The only “up to date” one I found - QtEmu - only supports configuring x86 virtual machines. There is no GUI however and the third party ones that exist mostly seem to be from 10 to 2 years out of date and many don’t support Windows at all. With such a wide variety of options and settings available you can imagine it will require some digging through the user interface and you’d be wrong. It’s an open-source emulator that unlike regular virtualization tools is quite capable of emulating completely different CPU architectures from ARM through to MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, Sparc and even IBM’s big s390x z/Architecture. sit ( StuffIt Expander) or only work with later Mac OS versions. Additionally some third-party fonts are distributed in.

This is a shame for me as that’s where the interface started diverging by adding color and some more interesting fonts. While James Friend’s PCE.js puts System 6 and System 7 at your fingertips when it comes to later 7.5, 8 or 9 the site doesn’t have you covered as PCE doesn’t support PowerPC emulation (it handles Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors). One limitation I’ve run into is digging into old Macintosh fonts. I’m often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity - and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc.

Windows emulator for mac os 8