The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Anything about Mac emulation that does not belong in the above categories.

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AHunter3
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The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Post by AHunter3 »

So if I'm going to switch to M1 ("Apple Silicon") based Macs I will need to emulate Intel Macs so as to be able to run MacOS X. That one's important. I'd be starting off in the M1 world with scarcely any software that will run there. And a need to run it. And I have invested a lot of time and energy to Parallels virtual machines and would like to bring the actual virtual machines over. When I switched from PowerPC Macs to Intel Macs, the Parallels tech support folks helped me convert a whole slew of Connectix VirtualPC environments to Parallels virtual machines, so this isn't so farfetched.

I know about QEMU. But anything that starts off with "download the source code, compile it, build a blank virtual hard drive from the command line, then configure it from the command line..." probably isn't a good prospect for me. I mean, I've compiled for X Window back in the day but I'd far rather deal with a GUI.



I'd also like...

a) A PowerPC Mac emulator to run older PPC MacOS X, although I don't have that working now under Intel OS X to be honest.

I've already got an M1-native build of SheepShaver.

Basilisk II? There an M1 variant of that yet?

And how about vMac Mini?



What are my prospects?
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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

My latest universal builds of both SheepShaver and BasiliskII will run fine on Apple Silicon (ARM, M1).

The vast majority of 64 bit Intel applications will run with the help of Rosetta 2.

Intel virtualisation is not possible. The latest Parallels version 17 will run on M1, but will then virtualise on ARM processor, not Intel. It will only only run ARM versions of Windows, no Intel versions.

What do you mean with "older PPC MacOSX"?
AHunter3
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Re: The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Post by AHunter3 »

What do you mean with "older PPC MacOSX"?
Panther, aka MacOS 10.3.8;
Jaguar, aka MacOS 10.2.8
don't really care about 10.1 or 10.0
Intel virtualisation is not possible.
I don't expect virtualization. Emulation would be fine. The M1 pretending to be Intel, much like VirtualPC was PowerPC pretending to be Intel and letting folks run Windows XP (etc) on a PowerPC Mac. I want a VirtualPC for M1 that will let me run MacOS 10.6.8, 10.11.6, 10.13.6, etc, as well as Windows95, WindowsXP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 7, etc.

(and I want to bring over all my virtual-machine environments, I don't want to install the OS from scratch. At worst I could migrate my environments using utilities designed for that purpose like Macrium Reflect, but I'd hate to have to chase down a separate utility for each OS, and I suspect Macrium won't behave well under Windows 3.11 for Workgroups... MacOS is easier to make bootable backups and restorations as long as the emulation environment is compatible with the virtual machine that Parallels creates.
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adespoton
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Re: The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Post by adespoton »

This is why I've got the thread set up for UTM...

UTM is a Parallels-like front-end for QEMU that allows you to run emulated PPC and x86 and virtualized ARM/M1 machines on macOS and iOS.

The bad news is that I've had no luck converting Parallels containers over to UTM containers. Parallels presents a very unique environment that none of the other solutions appear to match. So I had to build all my OS X x86 VMs all over again.

The good news is, being mostly a front end for QEMU-PPC for PPC stuff, I was able to just drop in my QEMU emulated OS X PPC images and they run.

Also, simpler Linux and Windows VMs seem to run without issue. Up to Windows XP, where the hardware profile is once again different, triggering the licensing failure in XP, so you'll need to re-register with your license from XP onwards.

For running a VM of macOS Monterey, there's native support; Apple's VM environment is finally maturing, so you can run a second virtualized instance of Monterey on an M1 running Monterey.

The OTHER good news is that running Android or Raspbian in UTM works great, as does running Windows 10 ARM, which can in turn seamlessly run Ubuntu ARM and Android in-line, as well as run x86 Windows apps (mostly) via emulation.

So the solution for most Windows x86 software is: UTM -> Windows ARM -> software (emulated).
While the solution for most macOS x86 software is: macOS Monterey -> software (Rosetta 2 emulated).

The native emulation of x86 apps on Monterey is just as fast as running the software on an older x86 Mac. Running their M1 equivalent is often notably faster.

This includes running emulators like Mini vMac, Basilisk II and SheepShaver.

For DOS and Windows 3.1.1 for Workgroups (and even Windows 9x!) you can run a build of DOSBox - like https://dosbox-x.com/
emendelson
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Re: The Need for M1 Hosted Emulators

Post by emendelson »

The OP didn't ask for something that would run Windows 3.1x, but this system runs on M1 Macs in native mode.

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/win31dosboxmac.html

It uses a custom build of DOSBox-X. The installation program needs Rosetta 2 because it uses wine, but the DOSBox-X based system that actually runs Windows 3.1x comes in M1 and Intel versions. Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll combine them into one system that runs the M1 version of DOSBox-X on M1 systems and the Intel version on Intel systems. I've already done that for my other DOSBox-X-based applications (DOSBox-X-App and DOSBoxWP).
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