It's recommended to rip the CD to the computer as an ISO. Booting the setup will go straight to a live environment with the option to install Mac OS 9.
You will need to get a copy of the Mac OS 9 installation CD. They've since loosened up a bit to allow virtualization of macOS on Mac hardware, but anything else muddys the water.
Until Mac OS X Lion, Apple licensed the software so that it was only permitted to be used with Mac hardware. Note that virtualization has always been a gray area for Apple. At the time of writing, Mac OS 9.0 to 10.4 boots and installs, but versions before and after do not work (like 10.5 and 8.5). But major efforts in a Google-sponsored Summer of Code event from 2015 brought QEMU's own PowerPC support even further. Development on PearPC paused between 20 while it encountered controversy with CherryOS, and the latest release was in 2015. Mac emulation became possible in 1998 starting with the release of SheepShaver and its competitor PearPC in 2004, cross-platform emulators aiming to emulate PowerPC on x86 specifically. The design of the Macintosh computers changed throughout its life the first Macintoshes were built with Motorola 68k processors but by version 9, PowerPC Macs were commonplace. Today, the modern incarnation is known as macOS. It was succeeded by Mac OS X, which targeted PowerPC Macs until the rollover to x86 in 2006, in which releases were shortened to OS X. These operating systems are collectively referred to as Classic Mac OS. You will want to refer to the wiki's PowerPC information as it contains potentially newer information beyond this article.īefore macOS, Apple sold Macintoshes with an operating system called System Software throughout its early lifespan, but the name only changed to Mac OS until version 8 in 1997. This page applies to version 9.2.1 of Mac OS, an obsolete version.