I apologize in advance because this video I'm recording on my m1 max yet again. That's
because I'm at my girlfriend's place where I am still in the process of fixing up this garage.
Hopefully, it'll sound alright. Previously I made a video on how to run QEMU on a MQ mac. This video is
going to be different (than last time) because instructions work for both Apple Silicon and Intel and we're going
to run Mac OS 9 with sound. This requires building a special version of QEMU called QEMU screamer
that has the appropriate sound drivers for Mac OS 9. Before we get started you need Xcode installed,
it's command line utilities, and homebrew. Homebrew? Don't mind if i do, if i don't say so myself.
Hell yeah...
I've written an accompanying article that includes step-by-step instructions on how to do this
and everything moving forward in this video so you don't have to try and copy everything on
the screen. These new instructions have been made possible now that QEMU has a Apple Silicon version
and homebrew has a lot of Apple Silicon binaries. So we can do all this using the same commands on
Intel and Apple Silicon macs. First let's get QEMU working we're going to install QEMU using homebrew .
homebrew is a package manager for installing open source software on the Mac. Think of it as an app
store for mostly command line utilities. First I'll check to see if i have homebrew installed
by just trying to run brew in my terminal. ... and Of course I do so let's move forward. I'll type in
homebrew install QEMU since I've installed this previously it'll install quickly but
if it's your first time it'll take a while as many dependencies that are required to run it.
QEMU emulates a lot of hardware and emulating Power PC macs is just one thing it can do first we need
to create a hard disk drive image. Anyone familiar with virtualization will understand this concept.
It's just a file that contains a virtual hard drive once it's done installing we can create
our virtual hard drive the utility is called qemu-img and it lets you create virtual disk images.
i'll check to see if it's installed and it is. i'll punch in the command qemu-create -f which is format ,
qcow2 the file extension for qemu and i'll give it a name. This can be anything you want but i'm going
to name it myos9.img and i'll give it a maximum space of 2 gigabytes. Notably, this file will not
eat up 2 gigabytes of space rather is capped at 2 gigabytes you can make this whatever you like
but 2 gigabytes is plenty for my needs. You can specify a path to the disk image but I'm just
going to create it to its default location which is the root of your user directory. Hit enter and
it's created now this disk image does not have an operating system on it so now let's download one
i recently discovered mac os 9 live's version of mac os 9.2.2 installer which is awesome as it's
very fast install which we'll see in a bit i'll download it and it's about 500 megabytes again
this was linked in the written version of this guide once it's downloaded it's time to get qmu
running this is the part that starts to look like a mystery to anyone who hasn't used qmu before but
i'll try and break it down so it's a little more human first we're going to type in qmu-system-ppc
which is exactly what it sounds like it's emulating a powerpc processor next it's
time to set up some flags which are configuration options for terminal applications there's manuals
and guides online for these and you can look those up i've done this before so i know what we need
we'll start by using dash capital l pc dash bios i'm not sure if this is necessary but it works
this is emulating pc bios which is funny as this is going to be a mac next is dash boot d
this means we'll boot off the d drive this is a quirk of qmu as the mac platform never use
letters to identify boot drives the d drive is the cd dvd drive next we'll use dash capital m which
is the model and we'll use mac 99 which is if i'm not mistaken a g4 qmu also comes with the profile
to emulate the base g3 now we'll use a lowercase dash m for memory and we'll give this 512 which
is 512 megabytes which is plenty for mac os 9 needs finally it's time to attach our disk images
we will use dash hda myos9.img and dash cd-rom for the cd-rom be sure to leave a trailing space
now for the installer disk image path i find it's easier to drag the disk onto the terminal
rather than type the path in finally we hit return and it'll boot off the cd-rom
image which automatically starts up with a text window open which we can ignore and then the disk
utility already open you'll need to format your hard drive then within your virtual environment
run the apple software restore this will go fast and this is why i like this installer so much
now we need to shut it down you can control alt g so you can move your mouse around and just close
the window now it's time to boot our mac we'll use the same command as before and a terminal
shortcut for people who aren't terminal users type up on your up arrow and you can cycle through your
last commands i've removed the cd-rom drive as it's no longer necessary for this and i'm going
to switch my boot volume back to the hard drive which is the c drive mac os 9 will boot and we'll
have the annoying setup that os is always want you to do i'll skip ahead and here it is mac os
is not that interesting without applications so let's grab the greatest game of all time and this
without question is simant we'll get that from the macintosh garden and they'll have multiple
versions and you'll have to correlate the one you want i'm going to download the cd-rom version
to install the game we'll need to relaunch our virtual machine with the cd-rom image which i
have for simant i'll leave my boot drive as the letter c as i want to boot off the hard
drive and like before i'll type in dash cd-rom with the trailing space and i'll drag the disk
image into the terminal to get the path to the image i'll install the game onto the hard drive
and i'll launch it and i can start playing it and it runs great except for one very big
problem we don't have sound and simon has awesome gross sound effects which really make the game
this is because qmu does not include sound emulations so we're gonna have
to do the incredibly geeky thing and download a special version of qmu called qmu screamer
and compile it to run on our mac for this section i'm literally going to be following
someone else's step-by-step instructions which again are part of the written guide
i'll move a bit faster here as we're just going to be copying pasting terminal commands
the first step is the git clone qmu screamer this will take a long time as it's very big
so i highly recommend doing something else like drinking a wonderful barrel aged stout
i've skipped ahead as it's installed and i'm going to go into the qmu screamer directory
by going dash streamer i'm copying and pasting in another big command which is for installing
the required homebrew utilities fortunately we've already installed a lot of these when we installed
qmu through homebrew skipping ahead yet again now it's time to do the package config path paste that
big old command into the terminal and let it do its thing yet again now it's time for the final
piece which is to go into the build directory and then we're going to copy and paste this command
and we're going to build homebrew screamer this will take some time but it's not super long it
didn't take more than about a minute or two on my m1 max now it's time to run qmu screamer with our
disk image with our game on it so let's use the command that we use to normally launch qmu first
i'm going to correct the path to my disk image so this application knows where the disk image is
then next i'm going to make sure i'm launching the qmu version that is found in the build folder and
that's done by adding dot slash in front of the command that is because i'm already in the build
folder where this application is located and of course it boots and this is the moment of truth
as this is my first time doing this so hopefully it's working and let's launch the application
and hey i have sound right on qmu works great for games that do not require 3d hardware on the mac
as rave or glide would take quite a bit to reverse engineer you can play 3d games that have software
rendering modes qmu is not limited to gaming by any stretch but is probably one of the more
popular uses for power pc emulation and is pretty fast a quick tip for people downloading software
a lot of times retro software comes in the dot toast format and you can mount these
just like a iso when you're using qmu unreal came this way the game i'm playing right
now and i'm running at 1024 by 768 only using software rendering this is actually impressive
because as i recall there wasn't any macs that could actually run a game at this resolution
in software only now it feels important to point out that you do not need to install qmu
via homebrew in order to do all the things i just did in this video you can skip straight
to building your own version of qmu screamer of course you'll still need to create the disk image
and then go through the process of installing your os my old video still has some great info and if
you're interested in emulating powerpc mac os 10 i have instructions in that video how to do it
and my guide will have some of the information in it too so hopefully you found this video useful
and you didn't mind the lower tier production i promise this is not going to be the new normal
hey and thanks for watching it is snowing in oregon this is not common