Is there any easy to setup power PC emulators

[ermgerd]

I've always wanted to use a powerPC emulator to try some earlier versions of macOS X since I pretty much grew up with them however all the power PC emulators are an absolute pain to get working.

[TheCollector1988]

well, QEMU can now emulate Mac OS X 10.0 as well as some betas of it and its entire family.

[ermgerd]

ah nice I wasn't aware, it will be a good use for my small ubuntu partition

[Wizman]

Here, sometimes it takes a pear to have an apple on an Intel PC:

http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

[Darkstar]

Just for fun, and to see if it really works, I installed MacOS 9.1 in QEmu. Took maybe 10 minutes (including downloading everything required). So yeah, it's become pretty easy to run PPC-MacOS on a PC nowadays


I don't think PearPC is that far yet, and quite frankly, with the recent improvements in QEmu, I don't think it'll ever catch up unless some more developers step up to improve it (which was one of the reasons why it has moved to GitHub recently, however, so far, the additional support has not yet manifested)

ah nice I wasn't aware, it will be a good use for my small ubuntu partition

Huh, what would you need Ubuntu for if you're trying to run MacOS?

[mrpijey]

How stable is PPC-MacOS in QEmu and what OS/OSX versions does it support? Been using SheepShaver myself but it's buggy and unstable so...

[ermgerd]

how do you get QEmu to run on windows?

[MrFreeman]

how do you get QEmu to run on windows?

Maybe if you've done a simple search, you would find atleast a couple sites where people are hosting Windows builds of QEMU.

Here's one of sites you would get in the search results:
http://lassauge.free.fr/qemu/

Not trying to be rude, but that's just how I get when somebody asks a question with an easy to find answer.

[ermgerd]

my bad ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, thanks anyway

[Darkstar]

I never used SheepShaver (couldn't get it to run reliably) but so far, QEmu with MacOS seems quite stable to me. I didn't put it through much testing though.

Depending on the version there are some problems with mouse capture (MacOS 9.1, supposedly you can get around it by using "-sdl" with QEmu but that's not enabled in the Windows build I use and I'm still struggling with setting up the toolchain to do my own builds) and network (you might need special drivers or something, didn't look into it that much yet).

According to this, it supports 9.0.4, 9.1, 9.2, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 pretty well, and 10.0.5 as well as other 9.0.x versions with more or less issues.

Offtopic Comment

Oh and I swear to god the next person who uses this stupid "I don't care" emoji will land on my blocklist

[coltonspleen]

Does it support the Public Beta though? I'd like to try and see if I can get the Public Beta to work. Maybe RunAsDate under WINE (if it even exists for that) would probably be able to essentially crack the GUI timebomb, although I'm not counting on it however. it's more of an experiment thing than anything else.

[sparcdr]

The problem with Sheepshaver is that it doesn't faithfully trap certain cpu calls which cause the emulator to crash when launching apps such as Internet Explorer or any other browser but Classilla; possibly others. Qemu took forever to support MacOS/PPC since it had an incomplete device tree for the platform for New World openfirmware; a similar theme that still plagues anyone hoping to run Aix via emulation. Sheepshaver is limited to 9.0.4 due to limitations of software MMU support which necessitate the real hardware or a better emulator. SheepShaver's advantage is host-fs drive mapping and two frontends. SheepShaver had a bridge driver up to XP SP2, but most people are limited to userland SLIRP for networking. Qemu may be better in that it offers support for Realtek 8139 and NE2000 adapters, which are the same lineage of "the end of os 9"; so one may hope. SheepShaver is built with SDL, albeit the decade old 1.2 which won't completely compile on most modern setups. Qemu has an RTC flag and can have its clock set manually.

See this (From BA) about the clock.

[Courage]

OK. I've been testing the ppc Apple stuff on an unofficial build of QEMU (specifically made for Mac OS X emulation) for a while now. It's available at http://emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9028.

Here are the versions that I've confirmed, do work on this build:

9.0.4 for the Power Mac G4 Cube (no other version will work, as their copies of the 'Mac OS ROM' file are earlier versions that do not work in QEMU).
9.1, including prereleases.
9.2.x, including prereleases.
10.0.x, including every prerelease build except for DP1 and DP4 (QEMU's emulated hardware is too new for DP1, and DP4 fails at boot with 'still waiting for root device').
10.1.x, including every prerelease build except for build 5F24 (for 5F24, see 10.0 DP4's note above).
10.2.x, including the prerelease build 6C35.
10.3.x, including the prerelease build 7A179.
10.4.x, including every prerelease build except for 8A323 (dunno what's up with it exactly atm).
10.5.x, didn't test prereleases (unlike previous versions, 10.5 has a lot of prerelease builds archived, and they're pretty huge as well, so I'm not going to test those atm).

QEMU 2.8.x should support 9.0.4-9.2.x, and then 10.2-10.4, if I remember correctly. Some of the patches in the unofficial version above didn't make it into the mainline for 2.8, but they should get mainlined in a few months.