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 path in fron to fthe image, but I just used the default pathing.
Yay! brew install qemu Step 2: Create a disk image Now that there's a universal binary for QEMU for x86 and Apple Silicon, we can install it using the same commands on both architectures.
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. 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.