E-Maculation

Over the past few days I've tumbled down the rabbit hole of acquiring software to recreate my computing environment of the late 90s, which included running Mklinux alongside OS 9. Unfortunately attempts to boot Mklinux in Sheepshaver result in an error message "Could not locate a good contagious memory chunk...". A bit of Googling suggests that this is because Sheepshaver doesn't emulate a proper MMU.

Has anyone had success running Mklinux in some emulated environment from OS X using Sheepshaver or anything else? Thanks for any nudges in the right direction.

SheepShaver is custom designed to run Mac OS PPC. It won't boot most other PPC OSes.

QEMU, however, happily boots a number of different OSes. See ProgrammingKid's documentation for what you can expect:

https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/PowerPC


I'm also interested to see if anyone get get Yellow Dog Linux running under emulation; I haven't tried lately.

Thanks. I'm going to give QEMU a shot. I'll post back with the results for posterity.

Alas, QEMU got got further into the boot process of Mklinux before hanging without any indiction of why.

I suspect this is a fruitless effort, so I'm giving up for now. I'll revisit the state of PPC emulation in a couple decades.

QEMU has a lot of possible configuration options; MKLinux was pre-USB, so you're going to want to use ADB mouse and keyboard emulation.

Also, I seem to recall MKLinux requiring PMU and MMU, so you may need to emulate Mac99p with one of the custom builds to get it to fully boot.