rainymac

Use QEMU to emulate a PPC Mac, with ease. Easy setup PPC versions of Mac OS X in QEMU!

Requirements

• A decent processor, otherwise performance is terrible
• > 1GB RAM unless you adjust the configuration
• > 10GB of drive space, 32 or up recommended
• ISO of the version of OS X you want, you can download Tiger with ./download-osx.sh
• qemu-system-ppc installed
• aria2 (for downloading iso)

Notes on Wayland

Since Wayland requires USB tablet emulation for the mouse to work correctly. I enabled it in the default config because it works fine in Tiger, unknown whether or not it works fine in other versions, you'll have to test that on your own, disable if it causes issues, check rainymac.cfg.

Installation

If you don't already have an iso you can download Tiger by running ./download-osx.sh.

• For easy installation run ./install.sh and give it the path to your iso file, then when it's done you can close QEMU and run ./rainymac.sh.
• You can also do the installation by enabling cdrom in the config, setting boot device to d, and setting it back to c after the installation.

Changing screen resolution

You'll quickly notice that the screen resolution is very low, 800x600. You can change it in System Preferences > Displays

Networking

You can enable or disable networking in the config if desired.

VNC connection

You can enable VNC in the rainymac.cfg. Here's a screenshot of connecting to the emulated machine via VNC:

SSH connection

If you want to ssh into the emulation you can enable ssh_forwarding in the config.

Enabling SSH in OS X:

• Open System Preferences
• Go to Sharing
• Enable "Remote Access"

SSH into the emulation with this command:

ssh -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -c 3des-cbc localhost -p 5555

Audio in Tiger/Leopard

• In OS X 10.4-10.4.3 it works out of the box, in anything higher you will need to do some work. Refer to one of my past blog posts: https://alicela1n.github.io/osx-10.5-ppc-in-qemu-with-working-audio
• Enable audio by setting usbaudio="on" in rainymac.cfg

Installing Xcode and developer tools in OS X Tiger

Requires dmg2img to be installed

• Download Xcode 2.5 from Apple's website.
• Convert to img like so dmg2img ~/Downloads/xcode25_8m2558_developerdvd.dmg xcode.img
• Run ./install.sh --stage2 and point to xcode.img for iso path
• Install Xcode Tools.pkg, with how slow this is it's normal to take a long time
• Shut down the emulation and start it with ./rainymac.sh

File transfer

File transfer is something that's always been a problem with running legacy operating systems in virtual machines. Most methods are either insecure or flat out don't work. File transfer can be achieved in multiple ways, such as running an FTP server on the host, which is what I usually do, however this isn't very secure.

You can also transfer files over SSH, not very secure but it works. However you shouldn't expect security from an ancient operating system in the first place. Example: scp -oKexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 -c 3des-cbc -P 5555 ~/Downloads/MacPorts-2.6.4-10.4-Tiger.dmg alice@localhost:~/Desktop

You can also use a disk image formatted as hfsplus or fat32. Copy your files to that disk image then pass it to QEMU. Since this is more advanced I won't cover that.

Installing MacPorts

I prefer MacPorts over Tigerbrew for a lot of reasons, it's more compatible and has more packages. Thankfully MacPorts still supports Mac OS X 10.4! You can install it with the MacPorts package from GitHub!

You can install packages with sudo port install.

Installing Tigerbrew

Open Terminal or use ssh and run the following commands: Install Tigerbrew using this command:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mistydemeo/tigerbrew/go/install)"

Add the path to your bash_profile with this command:

$ echo "export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Install packages using brew install or get help with brew help.