This was originally posted in the QEMU megatopic, but was split off due to that topic's enormous size.

With the recent confirmation that QEMU can run Mac OS 9.1 and 9.2 by default, I've decided to test what I can run by default.

Here's a basic compatibility list:

Used:
QEMU 2.7.0-rc0 w/ OpenBIOS compiled on July 19, 2016
Mac OS 9.2.1 (Install CD) + Mac OS 9.2.2 (Modified Install CD)
Windows 10 - x86-64

SimpleText - Works and is simple.

Disk Copy 6.5b13 - Works

Graphing Calculator - Seems to be (mostly) right, although the 3D animations go very slow. Watch out for any NaN cases, as those can trip up any PPC emulator.

Eric's Solitaire Sample(r) - Booting up from the CD doesn't work - it complains about not being able to read the preferences folder (not a big deal), but crashing with a fatal error message saying that it couldn't allocate memory to a GWorld (GWorld being an instance of the game's playing field). Could be a graphic memory allocation issue.

QuickTime 6.0.3 - Boots up, but no tests done on individual videos or images yet.

Scrapbook - The included 2D pictures do render...slowly, but 3D objects in the Scrapbook have not been tested yet (these do require Quickdraw 3D).

HyperCard Player - The sample app does seem to work fine, not sure about the other Hypercard stacks.

Sherlock 2 - Seems to work fine.

Scrapbook - Can't be tested, since this is a built-in component for Mac OS Classic and not part of the CD Extras folder.

To be tested:
Gerbils (Quickdraw 3D demo included with Macs until 8.5)
Bloodsuckers
Firefall
Power Pete
Maelstrom
Apeiron (Notable for having mouse problems on just about every emulator, even having problems on several real Macs)
Microsoft Word 98
Gravity (extension that allows for gravity on the Mac OS Desktop; a real test for floating point emulation and possibly the MMU too)
Outlook
Stuff-It Expander (any version really, versions 5-9 preferred)

I've yet to install 9.1 or 9.2 onto a hard disk, though it wouldn't seem like either of those work from a hard drive at this point.

Office 2001 runs fine in Mac OS 9.2.2
Office 98 is OK.
Adobe Premiere 5 runs OK.

Just to test backwards compatability, I tested Pararena 2.0 -- doesn't work as of Aug 21 build of 2.8. This is a 68k game, so it's possible I need to adjust some parameters to get it to stop crashing.

The main reason I think Pararena 2.0 doesn't work is that 68k applications usually rely on a 68k emulator. This emulator is in the Mac OS ROM though (not in any of the files within the System folder) and OpenBIOS lacks 68k emulation (obviously). If you want to run a 68k game, best bet might be Mac OS X with either Classic, Mini vMac or Basilisk II.

Noted; I'm attempting to find the edges of what is currently supported. qemu gets as far as loading the application, even though it has no JOY; I'm thinking OpenBIOS likely needs to throw an error instead of loading into memory and failing on the first instruction.

Some new things:

QEMU 2.8-devel (Cat7 build)
OpenBIOS PPC RTAS (July 31, 2016 build)

Apple System Profiler - As I do use mac99, this appears to work fine.

Acrobat Reader 5 - You can open documents just fine, but trying to use the scroll bar after switching between fullscreen and windowed doesn't work. Also, when switching between fullscreen and windowed in QEMU, the buttons on the top can't be clicked on, since doing so always results in the right-click/control-click menu appearing (and this is without holding Control down, like you usually do). If this happens, quite out of Reader 5 and re-open it.

Scrapbook - As before, you can see the 2D pictures, which render faster in 2.8. 3D objects do appear without crashing, although I suspect rotating them would be very slow. Surprisingly, this is with Quickdraw 3D 1.6, which would crash Sheepshaver any time you opened a 3DMF file with 1.6 rather than 1.5.4 or older.

Clasilla 9.3.3 - You can start this up fine and it appears to work, but I'm not sure how well the Internet works yet.

The click/key issues you're describing are actually due to "stuck" keys when qemu grabs the keyboard. It doesn't always happen, and you can get out of it by switching modes and/or hitting the offending key a few times (can't remember whether that's while in host context or guest context). VirtualBox used to have the same issue; not sure how they fixed it (but mouse capture seems messed up for me in vbox 5.1, so they've got some regressions in this area).

Yep, pressing Control and/or Alt does unstick those keys.

Three new ones:

QuickTime Player (QuickTime 6.0.3) - Runs, although it's way too choppy and there's no sound, since neither AWACS or Screamer are supported. USB Audio devices might not work either.

Apple MRJ 2.2.6 (Java Runtime) - Works smoothly with the example applets given. Other applets have yet to be tested.

iTunes 2.0.4 - Boots up, although it's pretty much useless without any kind of audio support.

Some suggestions for fixing the audio issue:
http://www.jackosx.com/ -- won't help on OS 9, but we should be able to deploy a network audio driver that uses a remote sound card (the host) to drive audio. Can't guarantee it'll work, but it's worth experimenting

http://abyssoft.com/software/soundfly/ -- built on top of SoundFlower, for OS X Tiger. Works on Lion as well; not sure about older versions of OS X. This seems like a perfect fit for audio in qemu on OS X hosts; Jack would probably be the better bet for non-OS X hosts.

Now that I got Internet connections up and running in Mac OS 9... I can easily recommend Classilla over IE5 any day. IE5 crashes more and that also crashes when you quit it. Classilla is also more compatible than IE5 with the Internet.

A new one, though...

SpeedRun: Runs fine, but it's a bit slow, given how much more feature-filled QEMU is. For the record, the bigger the number, the better the performance is.

Here's an old result from a version of Sheepshaver in 2010 (Windows 7, 64-bit):


(To my knowledge, I don't think anyone has seen this result before.)

And here's QEMU 2.8-devel (Cat7 build) in 2016 (Windows 10, 64-bit):


So yeah, if we were to judge these scores, Sheepshaver is almost 5 times as fast as QEMU. However, I haven't compared these results to actual Macs (like the Power Mac G3 or the iMac G3)

These were run on machines with similar, although not identical, specs.

Maelstrom 1.4.3 - Boots and can be playable, although you might not want to mess with the controls too much, as you can lose control temporarily. You'll probably want to enable the USB keyboard for this game. (I have not tried out the SDL version yet)

Gerbils - An old Quickdraw 3D demo from 1995, but I'm still surprised at how smoothly it runs in QEMU. It performs adequately, even if QEMU lacks hardware acceleration.

StuffIt Expander 6 - Works fine, with no noticeable issues.

Do you have the software you used for the speedrun available? I've got some Minis I could run the tests on for a comparison.

Also, I'd like to run a few tests on my system, which mounts drives as block devices off a high speed SSD. One of the main bottlenecks in qemu appears to be disk I/O, and using raw block devices on a fast host storage device seems to improve things significantly.

[edit] SheepShaver improves Disk I/O by patching the ROM so that I/O is managed by the host, not the guest system. Qemu, on the other hand, emulates the entire hardware chain, so disk processes have to be handled by a lot more virtual hardware prior to reads and writes. Some effort has been made to speed things up on the emulator side of things with qcow3, limiting the slowdown to the emulated (not the file handling) part of qemu -- I'm not sure if qcow3 is faster than raw writes to a block device though; I haven't tested that.

But by using the host's block system off of /dev, much of the drive image handling is moved to the host to take care of instead of qemu, freeing qemu to spend more of its time doing the actual emulation.

http://www.tucows.com/preview/350557/SpeedRun

There's the download link to the SpeedRun benchmark I used. It's old though, like mid-2002 old. It's meant more for G3s and G4s than G5s or Intels. I should also note the QEMU result I posted is also because I added "cache=writethrough" to my batch file (see the long-running GSOC QEMU topic for more info). That means all the disk writing is handled by the host, but QEMU must signal to the guest OS about this, and is probably why the hard drive score could be as low as it is. One could also change "cache=writethrough" to "cache=writeback", though I'm not sure how well this works with Windows (10).

There's also XBench: http://www.xbench.com/, which is much more suited toward newer Macs, though it still is meant for 10.3.9 - 10.6.x.

Thanks; I'll try to run some tests.

[edit]
G4/1416 Power Mac (10.4.9) G 126 H 664 P 567 R 1886 O 784

Here's ZDNet's MacBench® 5.0 running inside QEMU 2.8-devel, emulating a G3 processor.

All of the systems seen below were running at 800*600, and all comparisons are between the two emulators run already (Sheepshaver and QEMU) with the results included with MacBench 5.0. Sheepshaver, QEMU, and the Power Mac G3/300 ran at in Millions of Colors. The PowerBooks all ran at Thousands of Colors (16-bit color). All scores are in comparison to the Power Mac G3/300.

Processor


QEMU doesn't do too bad here, snatching a humble third place. However, QEMU does emulate the L2 cache, which their PowerBook G3 lacked. The disk cache is also bigger in QEMU than in any of the computers ZDNet used.

Floating Point


However, when it comes to floating point operations, QEMU falters hard, being second to last and just barely being better than the PowerBook 1400c/117.

Disk


Here, we can see writeback runs a little slower than writethrough when it comes to disk writing. Unsurprisingly, Sheepshaver screeches through this and the below test, since the disk operations are all handled by much faster computers and through the host OSes. QEMU still puts up a decent challenge either way, though.

Publishing Disk


Strangely, while the regular disk test goes slower with writeback in QEMU, it does go a little faster with the publishing disk option.

So, it seems QEMU really needs to improve its floating point emulation. Otherwise, it isn't too shabby. There are still some other options to test for the disk though, such as with the aio command.

Agreed; on writethrough with sparsebundle backing via block device, I'm getting 1327 on the Disk test and 1012 on the Publishing test. This means that other than the FPU, QEMU 2.8-devel is performing marginally better than a Power Macintosh G3/300. Good enough for me.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try installing PowerFPU to see if offloading all FPU to the main processor core would change anything.
Without PowerFPU, my score is 329.
With PowerFPU, my score is 324.

Not really statistically significant, but it looks like instead of passing floating point operations to the host to process and return, qemu is basically doing the same thing as PowerFPU and just performing FPU emulation in-line.

This was getting hard to keep track of, so I made a spread sheet
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

QEMU Mac OS X build 19.05.2017, well, the latest here in the forum.

Spanish Mac OS 9.2.2, 512MB RAM, G4


FreeHand 10 WORKS

FreeHand MX refuses to install, gives error: "Error al lanzar la memoria intermedia" (¿"Error when launching intermediate memory?") and error code 1009:1,-2.


At the end of the summer, when I get back to my G4 sawtooth, I'll copy an installed Freehand folder and see if it is only the installer, but... I wanted FH MX in my MacBook Air

The Freehand installer should work on both, OS 9 and PPC OS X. Why not install it on a VM with Snow Leopard and run it through Rosetta? That's what I do. It is way faster than Qemu. I run FH10 as I don't have the last update with bug fixes for MX (and without that, MX sucks).

I'm in a MacBook Air with 128GB. The difference between a 2GB virtual disk image for OS9 and a ¿20GB? to install Snow Leopard is quite big. In fact, my desktop iMac still runs natively Snow Leopard so it's not a problem. I have a PowerMac G4 as well, I was just looking for something that could work with the thousand FreeHand files I have while I am only with my 2013 MacBook Air.

The software products below were tested on Mac OS 9.2.1 using Qemu64bit-Windows-Screamer-24122017 which is an experimental build with some speed improvements and sound support. I used the 256-color VGA driver trick explained here in order to test some games that run in 256 colors. These were the instructions I followed.

APPLICATION SOFTWARE & UTILITY PROGRAMS

Toast Titanium v5.2.1 (Roxio). At least mounting TOAST files and some IMG files works. Screenshot.
Toast Deluxe v4.1.3 (Adaptec). The same as above if my memory serves me right. Screenshot.
Toast v3.5.7 (Adaptec). Unless my memory fails me, I succeeded in mounting some TOAST and IMG files. Screenshot.
ShrinkWrap v3.5.1. Can mount and convert various image files without any issues.
Disk Copy (pre-installed). Works but not fully tested.
Disk Copy v6.3.3 (French). Works but not fully tested.
Virtual CD/DVD-ROM Utility v1.0d3. Runs without any issues. Not fully tested though.
DVDExtractor v0.9b. The same as above.
Virex v6.1. Scanning files for viruses works. Screenshot.

None of the optical disc authoring programs above were able to mount audio CD or hybrid CD images created on modern disc image software.

----------------------------

GAMES

4D Boxing v1.0. Stalls on a black screen during startup.

System Shock (1994) (CD). The colors are all messed up for some reason. Maybe this is due to the 256-color VGA driver trick not working properly. Screenshot.

Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995) (CD). I was able to run the game on highest settings at 640x400. The framerate was OK. The only major problem I encountered was that I could not get the mouse to work. I'm no longer accustomed to playing old FPS games without mouse look. Also, I suspect there was a constant sound delay of approx. 444-500 milliseconds... For example, when I pressed the button to fire my blaster, the sound of the blaster firing didn't happen until maybe half a second after the action had happened onscreen. Here's a YouTube video of me giving the game a short test run on QEMU. The sound you hear in the video was edited to remove the delay.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1996) (CD). The game seems to run just fine except for a few issues. For proof, check out this video clip on YouTube. The sound quality leaves a lot to be desired, as there's a constant background hiss which is quite audible. Also, the font used during mission briefings looks weird. The biggest problem is that I haven't figured out how to get the CD audio to work. (The audio CD tracks that can be heard in the YouTube video were added after recording...) The problem is explained here in more detail.

A few brief experiments in 9.1 (I haven't tried 9.2.2 yet) with the current screamer build, 26062018. Some are stock and some use the 256 VGA driver (apparently 256 is needed for a lot of old games).
Color legend:
Purple not only doesn't work but crashes the virtual system.
Red doesn't work at all -- usually, refuses to launch.
Orange launches, but isn't playable in-game (whether because of a bug or because the emulation is too slow).
Brown is playable, with some minor flaws.
Green works well with no obvious flaws beyond performance.

Classilla 9.3.3: Runs w/o problem.
Candy Crisis v1.2 : Freezes at splash screen.
Firefall 2.0, Mighty Mike: Don't start, w/following error: "PrepDrawSprockets: DSpFindBestContext failed"
Galactic Empire: Runs w/o problem.
Galactic Trader: Runs w/o problem.
Gridz 1.3.1: Doesn't start, with error code "-1, from No Available Screens".
B&W Hazardous: Seems to run well, from brief testing.
Icebreaker Demo: Runs, seems good.
MacDo: Crashes before main screen, with error type 2.
NetFungus: Runs w/o problem.
Rescue 2.0.5: Seems to run well, from brief testing.
Sim Cinema Deluxe: Runs w/o problem.
Space Wumpus: Runs w/o problem.
Spades Deluxe 2.1: Runs w/o problem.
Star Patrol: Runs w/o problem — better than SheepShaver as SS emulation introduces a bug with shields and energy.
Wheels Demo: Runs w/o problems.
Wumpus v2.0.2: Slow launch, but otherwise runs well.
TheZone 1.5.1 (standard): Doesn't load; 'can't access the monitor gamma table'.
Zroids: Runs a little slowly at points but looks good overall, from brief testing.
Carmen World Deluxe (256/basic desktop installation, not full CD): Color glitches and possible slow sound playback, but works fine overall.
Checkers Deluxe (256): Runs w/o problem.
Bert 1.0a2 (256) Seems to run well.
Gridz 1.3.1 (256): Launches, but runs very slowly. I don't have my serial number handy so I can’t test in-game performance but I’m betting from looking at the main menu it isn’t good.
Gunshy (256) Runs w/o problems.
Klondike 7.7.1 (256) Launches slower than would be expected with the app’s age, but runs fine.
MacDo (256) Application launches fine and has good music playback, but the game itself freezes after selecting “New Game”. It has a couple of graphic options in preferences so perhaps trying one of those might help; haven't done that yet.
Meat Gone Bad II v1.0.8 (256): Runs well, if not as crisply as I remember it being on a native iMac. Better than SheepShaver overall because SS messes up the mouse control.
Mighty Mike (256): PrepDrawSprockets: DSpContext_SetState failed.
Oxyd (256) Freezes on splash screen.
PizzaRush (256) Slightly choppy at times but runs well overall.