Setting up PearPC for Windows

(Updated February 21, 2010)

PearPC emulates a PPC Macintosh (G3 or G4) capable of booting Mac OS X, up to version 10.4 (Tiger).

Setting up the emulator is fun and easy! But before you begin installing, there are a few things that you need to assemble:

• A copy of Mac OS X. You can use version 10.4 (Tiger) or earlier. You can use an OS X install CD, or a disk image that you've created or downloaded. The screenshots and instructions in this guide are of 10.4, although other versions are set up in a very similar way. Note: You cannot use a physical DVD image. DVD is not emulated. If you have a physical DVD, you need to make an image from it. Physical CDs can be used.
• PearPC 0.4.0. This is the last official, stable release of the emulator. I recommend starting with this. Later you can try PearPC 0.5pr. That version is known as the “redscorp” release of the emulator. It might be faster that the stable release. Check out this forum thread on PearPC.net for more information.
• A front-end called PearPC Control Panel which can be used to set up the emulator. This is optional.
• A bootable 6 GB disk image. Note: Because this image is entirely empty, it is compressed down to a tiny size. It will, however, take five minutes (or more) to expand.

Note: This guide uses the PearPC Control Panel for setup. This front-end is user friendly, but is somewhat flakey. If you are competent or if you have some problems with launching the emulator, I highly recommend that you ditch the control panel and instead create a config file using Guillaume Jamet's online config file generator. When you have done this, you should launch the emulator from a command prompt.

Note: Reader fanman93 recommends The Moron's Guide to Tiger on PearPC as a guide to launching the emulator from the command prompt.

It is much easier to install OS X on your emulated computer from an .ISO image, rather than from a physical OS X installation disk. In Windows, you can create an .ISO from your physical disk using something like MagicISO. If necessary, you can perhaps download a disk image somewhere. If you download a .TOAST image, just change the extension to .ISO. If you download a .DMG image, try using UltraISO to convert it to ISO.

There are a few more notes about converting .DMG files in our dmg2iso article.

Download PearPC and the control panel. Extract the emulator and the 6 GB disk image (the latter will take a while). Install the control panel.

Run the control panel. Select “New Configuration File” from the file menu. Click “continue” to begin the configuration setup wizard. On the first wizard screen, click on “browse” to locate your PearPC executable.

Your “Primary IDE device” will be the 6 GB disk image. Browse to and select it. The type should be “Hard Drive.”

Finally, assign some RAM to PearPC. The more, the better.

See figure one, below, for a look at this setup screen.

Figure One: Setting up PearPC

Click “continue” to move to the next screen. You don't need to change any of this right now. You might want to increase your resolution a bit, to make it easier to see the OS X installation screens (they might not scale down to fit a 640×480 screen). Make sure that the path to your video driver (video.x) is correct - it is located in the same directory as the pearpc executable. Note that setting a lower video redraw rate will give you smoother mouse movements, but a possibly slower emulation. Experiment with this at a later time if you find it necessary.

See figure two, below, for a look at this setup screen.

Figure Two: Still setting up PearPC

Click “finish” to move to the next screen. Give your configuration file a name and save it somewhere.

You will now be returned to the main control panel screen. You now need to identify your installation disk. Check “CD-ROM device is installed” and then “browse” to locate your ISO image. Finally, hit the green “play” button to boot the emulator.

Figure three: Selecting my installation disk image

Note: You must install your operating system onto the 6 GB disk image linked to at the beginning of the guide. The “create disk image” feature of the PearPC Control Panel will not create disk images that can be booted from. Booting from such a disk image will result in an ”<Error> invalid format (filesize isn't a multiple of 516096)” message.

Note: Occasionally, the PearPC Control Panel will return a “Runtime Error 76” and refuse to save or import any config files. If this happens, you must uninstall the control panel, delete the *.ini files remaining in the program directory (they are not removed by the uninstaller) and reinstall the control panel.

When the PROM boot-loader screen appears boot from the CD-ROM image (see figure four, below).

Figure four: Select the bootable partition

The OS X installer should start to boot. You will first be prompted to select a language. You will then see a splash screen looking something like figure five, below.

Figure five: Getting ready to install Mac OS X

If you are installing on to the bootable disk image linked to at the beginning of the guide, you will not need to partition it. Just follow the on-screen instructions to install OS X. Installation might take from thirty minutes to a couple of hours. to speed this up, you can do a “custom” install without foreign language files or extra printer drivers.

Figure seven: About to install OS X

Figure eight: OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

You're finished! If everything went according to plan, you should be looking at a desktop looking something like figure eight. If you need any help, we run a support forum.