Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

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stealer0517
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Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by stealer0517 »

Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere, I can't search for this very well since the engine throws out all my search terms for being too common.
My end goal is to get Qemu running on my 2008 (and potentially 2006) MBP running 10.6 Snow Leopard.
I haven't been able to get anything over 1.7 to compile in 10.6, however I'm not very familiar with compiling software myself so it could just be PEBCAK.

I've managed to get version 1.7 compiled in both 10.6, and 10.11, but I run into the same issue.
Qemu opens, but I get this error in open bios:

Code: Select all

MacOS: Boot Failure! (0xF3C481F6)
MacOS: device has < 1 interrupts!
Googling around I found single forum post that mentions it, and it basically says that the interrupt controller wasn't found or something and I got lost.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu ... 00117.html


Does anyone have any experience getting this older version of Qemu working with this error?
Would potentially swapping the open bios for the actual open firmware from one of my PowerMacs solve this?
If so how would I go about extracting it? I have a wide variety of machines.

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Cat_7
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by Cat_7 »

Hi,

Qemu gained the option to boot Mac OS 9 with version 2.7 back in 2017. So you would need to compile that, but I have no idea whether that could be built with 10.6. Somewhere in the code there should be a reference to the minimum version of OSX required. Qemu's backward compatibility policy is to support the current and the two prior version of OSX/macOS.
You cannot use a rom from a real machine.

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Ronald P. Regensburg
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

If the same backward compatibility policy was used in 2017, the earliest OSX version that version 2.7 could be used with would be OSX 10.10 (Yosemite).
September 2017 macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) was released.
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adespoton
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by adespoton »

And having said that, the 2.7 support for OS 9 was a wee bit spotty. 2.8 was when we saw pretty solid support. It's all documented in our GSOC mega thread on here :)

To get it running on Snow Leopard, I'd recommend installing MacPorts, which can install backports, including the entire LLVM toolchain and CLANG 11. I know this, because I'm currently using it on my 2007 Mini running SLS. I haven't attempted to compile and install QEMU on it yet; once I get my other projects dealt with, I may try that.

Also, I just checked, and MacPorts for 10.6 currently supports QEMU 5.2.0, which should get you all sorts of features and stability.
stealer0517
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by stealer0517 »

adespoton wrote: Mon Apr 12, 2021 5:03 pm And having said that, the 2.7 support for OS 9 was a wee bit spotty. 2.8 was when we saw pretty solid support. It's all documented in our GSOC mega thread on here :)

To get it running on Snow Leopard, I'd recommend installing MacPorts, which can install backports, including the entire LLVM toolchain and CLANG 11. I know this, because I'm currently using it on my 2007 Mini running SLS. I haven't attempted to compile and install QEMU on it yet; once I get my other projects dealt with, I may try that.

Also, I just checked, and MacPorts for 10.6 currently supports QEMU 5.2.0, which should get you all sorts of features and stability.
I originally tried MacPorts to get it installed but it wouldn't compile.
Apparently you need the last two versions of Mac OS to compile the latest Qemu.
I asked the MacPorts team about it and it's something that can't be fixed on their end.
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/62640

The Qemu website says it runs on as old as 10.5, but I'm not sure how you could get a more modern version working on 10.5.
https://www.qemu.org/download/

I'll see tonight if I can get version 2 to compile on 10.7 since the downloads page suggests that it works better.
In the end I'd like both an early version of X (ideally 10.2) and 9.2 to run in qemu.
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adespoton
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by adespoton »

As I said in the comments, you'll probably want at least version 2.8. I'm still tracking down how to get the toolchain working in 10.6 via MacPorts; there should be at least some method to get it working from there.

Hmm... next up, https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/In ... gOlderPort -- I'm pretty sure the latest QEMU should install with tweaks, but I don't have the time to dig into the internals to see where it currently breaks. I'm pretty sure the version we're looking for that should definitely work is from before MacPorts moved to GitHub, so installing the older port may be a dead end too -- installing from original source of an older version may actually be the easiest route.
stealer0517
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by stealer0517 »

I tried compiling various versions of 2 on 10.7 and the highest I could go was version 2.5.X. 2.6, and 2.8 would fail to compile.
I guess I'll try going up another Mac OS release and maybe I'll be able to get up to 2.10 working, then I'll just need to see if it actually runs on the older OSes.
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by adespoton »

Let us know how it turns out; you're in uncharted territory here, but territory I've been skirting around the outside of for a while :)
stealer0517
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Re: Booting Mac OS 9 in Qemu for 10.6 Snow Leopard

Post by stealer0517 »

After many delays I finally compiled version 2.8 on Mac OS 10.8 and.....
Illegal instruction. Dang.

Well in the end I got a 2006 MBP running 10.4 that will serve as one of my many bridge machines.
This was mostly to see if I can do this rather than a direct need.
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