We are telling the emulator to use PC bios. I'm still not sure if this is necessary or there's a more correct way but this works perfectly fine. Now we're going run the qemu-system-PPC, app which is exactly what it sounds like.

The command: qemu-system-ppc -L pc-bios -boot d -M mac99 -m 512 -hda myos9.img -cdrom path/to/disk/image I recently discovered the Mac OS 9 lives version of macOS 9.2 installer, which is tailored for emulators like QEMU, as it launches to the disk utility and is a stream lined install It's about 500 MB. If you're already a terminal user who knows about man, awesome. No one is born knowing esoteric flags like this, and this is how users such as myself figure out comamnd line utilities. Anyone can look up with *nix utilities manuals by using the man command or searching in a search engine, qemu-img man and get detailed explinations like this page that explain the various flag options. I want to be very clear that terminal commands aren't magic. It'll happen very fast as this utility is very quick. Hit enter to run this command and application. You can make it whatever you like, but 2 GB is plenty for my needs. Notably, this file will not eat up 2 GBs of space. You can specify the path of this image but I'm going to leave at the default, which is in the root of your user directory. myos9.imgThe other option QEMU supports is a Beige G3. -f qcow -M is the model, and our model is a mac99 which is a G4 Mac.

create -f is format and qcow2 is QEMU's file format of choice for disk images.

qemu-imgis the name of the utility application that qemu comes with to create disk images.

The comand qemu-img create -f qcow2 myos9.img 2G Once it's done installing we can create our virtual hard drive. It's just a file that contains a virtual hard drive. Anyone familiar with virtualization will understand this concept. That's it! Setting up QEMU and installing Mac OS 9įirst, we need to make a hard drive disk image. You can check if you homebrew installed on your mac by running brew and seeing if it gives an error or additional instructions brew Installing QEMU via Homebrew brew install qemu Think of it as the App Store but for mostly command-line utilities. Homebrew is a package manager for installing open-source software on the Mac. Xcode is Apple's IDE for developing software for macOS and iOS/tvOS/iPadOS and it includes a lot of software that is beneficial to power users.

ability to follow instructions to use the terminal.

Xcode's Command utilities ( How to install here).

You'll need the following on your Mac to get started:

Mac os 9 emulator