It started with trying to get the classic game Star Fleet I: The War Begins running in a Mini vMac-emulated Macintosh Plus 4MB. Then I stumbled upon this forum and learned that one could use QEMU to emulate a PowerPC Mac for running Mac OS X which intrigued me. Running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is just the ticket I need to access some old files of mine that modern GNU/Linux software (which I now use as a daily driver) can't read.
After lots of trial and error and fiddling, I managed to install and successfully boot into a fresh copy of Mac OS X 10.5 on a 64-bit Windows 10 host based on the E-Maculation wiki instructions here. For reference, here's my Windows batch file for starting QEMU (the 01-05-2020 Qemu 5.0 build for Windows with sound support and with fpu speed-up from here) to install Mac OS X:
Code: Select all
qemu-system-ppc-screamer-50.exe ^
-L pc-bios ^
-boot d ^
-M mac99,via=pmu ^
-m 2048 ^
-prom-env "auto-boot?=true" -prom-env "boot-args=-v" -prom-env "vga-ndrv?=true" ^
-drive file=[Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard boot disc image as ISO file here],format=raw,media=cdrom ^
-drive file=[QEMU hard disk image in IMG format],format=raw,media=disk ^
-sdl ^
-netdev user,id=network01 -device sungem,netdev=network01 ^
-device VGA,edid=on ^
-g 1440x900x32
1. It was hard to get a disc image of the Mac OS X 10.5 install media that successfully boots into the installer in QEMU. In the end, the only image that worked for me was this one from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/Mac_OS_X_Le ... _Inc._2007
For some reason, the two 10.5 disc images from Macintosh Garden don't boot for me.
2. When the Mac OS X 10.5 installer is about to finish, it gave me an "Install Failed" screen that claims 'The installer could not make the computer start up from the volume "Macintosh HD".' At this point, the installer offers to restart the computer for you to retry the installation. DO NOT click the "Restart" button! Instead open the "Choose Startup Disk" utility from the "Utilities" menu, click to select the volume to which you installed Mac OS X 10.5 (called "Macintosh HD" by default), then click "Restart...".
This will reboot the QEMU virtual machine back into the installer. Just manually turn off the virtual machine.
Now, remove the line in the QEMU batch file that attaches the installer image, and change the line with "-boot d" to "-boot c" and the virtual machine will now boot into the freshly installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (at least for me). Internet access is available via Safari 3.0.4 though most pages refuse to load because of what looks like outdated HTTPS support in this years-old version of Safari.
My main problem now is I still can't figure out how to set up a shared folder between this QEMU Mac OS X 10.5 guest and my Windows 10 host! The instructions in the E-Maculation wiki is for Mac OS 9.2.2 and not for Mac OS X...
Nonetheless, I hope this information is helpful for someone and saves some time fiddling.