An Afternoon Diversion in MacOS 9
To satisfy a curiosity, and itch an itch that never got scratched (Mac G3’s were awfully pretty in their day) I tried installing MacOS9 in a virtual machine.
Lo and behold:
I can’t decide what I find more interesting:
- MacOS 9 had a version of Internet Explorer
- It was this easy to get running under QEMU
- MacOS 9 isn’t particularly intuitive at first blush
I followed https://www.jamesbadger.ca/2018/11/07/emulate-mac-os-9-with-qemu/ ; ignored the parts Mac-specific, used QEMU PPC as available in Debian 12 and used the following as my commandline:
qemu-system-ppc -cpu g4 -M mac99,via=pmu -m 512 -hda macos9.img -cdrom "Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Inst.iso" -boot c -g 1024x768x32 -device usb-kbd -device usb-mouseObviously, substitute in your hdd image file and cdrom install file names.