Emulating NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody on QEMU x86

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lyrical
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Emulating NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody on QEMU x86

Post by lyrical »

Hello!

Has someone been able to successfully emulate the x86 version of MacOS X Rhapsody (or OpenStep/NeXTSTEP) on QEMU?
I have been trying to do it for the past 2 days with no success because I do not know what drivers to use.
According to the QEMU docs, the pc machine simulates a host with a PCI bridge and PIIX3 PCI to ISA bridge, so I tried using the matching drivers (Intel PIIX EIDE/ATAPI, PCI host support and others), but it won't even recognize the HD drive. I also tried using SCSI with both HD and CD-ROM, however the PCI SCSI driver will complain that it hasn't been able to configure something and panic.

This is the command I'm running:

Code: Select all

qemu-system-i386 -m 64M -smp 4,sockets=1,cores=2,threads=2 --accel tcg,thread=multi -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -vnc :0 -cpu pentium -vga cirrus -M pc-i440fx-2.0 \
                                          -drive file=Rhapsody.img,format=raw \                                                                                 
                                          -cdrom rhapsody.iso \
                                          -fda MNT.dsk -boot a
I have tried running NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and Rhapsody, and every single one of them had the same issue.
Any ideas?
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adespoton
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Re: Emulating NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody on QEMU x86

Post by adespoton »

It's on my list of things to do in UTM; right now I've got 10.7 through 10.15 emulating, but I'm still fighting with 10.4, 10.5, 11 and 12.

I'm doing the cheats way first, and just importing my already-set-up disk from x86 VMWare Fusion. My plan is to use Penryn CPU and OpenCore-32-bit bios/drivers as a starting point, and slowly work my way backwards towards a Pentium III architecture.
lyrical
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Re: Emulating NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody on QEMU x86

Post by lyrical »

adespoton wrote: Mon Dec 06, 2021 11:00 pm It's on my list of things to do in UTM; right now I've got 10.7 through 10.15 emulating, but I'm still fighting with 10.4, 10.5, 11 and 12.

I'm doing the cheats way first, and just importing my already-set-up disk from x86 VMWare Fusion. My plan is to use Penryn CPU and OpenCore-32-bit bios/drivers as a starting point, and slowly work my way backwards towards a Pentium III architecture.
If you figure out how to do it, let me know! Also, since you are trying to run the x86 version of 10.4-10.5, this gist looks helpful, however I haven't used it before, so I don't know whether it works or not: https://gist.github.com/CyberShadow/b50 ... 9d1398340f
About macOS 11-12, if you don't mind cheating, you can just use OSX-KVM and get it running in ~2h with almost no intervention. Used that one and it works pretty well.

I'm new to this emulation thing, but so far it has been very cool. Yesterday I was able to boot OS X 10.1 on my cellphone (a Samsung w/ a Snapdragon, 32-bit though). Sadly, it was EXTREMELY slow (probably because of FS restrictions on Android). Installation took ~8 hours, but hey, at least it was able to boot and work properly. Mac OS 9 also works (it's much better than OS X, btw. doesn't lag as much).

These OpenStep systems should be easy to run, however QEMU just refuses to work with it. When I got close to booting the kernel (both CD-ROM and HD were detected and registered successfully), the ATAPI driver started to time out and then the kernel panicked. What I am planning to do is compile qemu 9.1.0, which supposedly works. Hopefully that'll do, however performance will probably get even worse.
Bruninho
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Re: Emulating NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody on QEMU x86

Post by Bruninho »

I once managed to install and run Rhapsody DR2. There's not much you can do there without networking and any useful app.
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