Included below is the instruction for both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. When I originally wrote this guide, there wasn't a native version of QEMU for Apple Silicon, I've updated this guide so it is now correct I've gotten OS 10.0 and nearly gotten Windows 10 working on my M1. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to skip over installing Homebrew on an Apple M1, but you'll want to use the arch -x86_64 method, which requires prepending.

I was able to play Sim City 2000 on Mac OS 9.2 at a fairly high resolution. It's surprsingly very usable but the usefulness is going to be limited. I encountered very little resistance, which surprised me as I haven't seen/read anyone trying this route. Thus far, the community has succeeded in getting QEMU to install the ARM version Windows, so I decided to do the more silly path and get PPC and X86 working on Apple Silicon. Now, this post wouldn't be very exciting if I tried this on my Mac Pro, but I decided to try it on my MacBook M1. Still, in this example, I'm using Homebrew, a package manager for macOS/OSX that allows you to install software via the CLI and manage easily.

There are alternate versions and different ways to install it. It's pretty powerful, free, and has a macOS port. Unlike VMWare, it's able to both virtualize CPUs and emulate various CPU instruction sets. QEMU is an open-source emulator for virtualizing computers. The info this guide is valid but I written a new one about QEMU screamer which emulates Mac OS 9 - OS X 10.14 with sound.

Mac os x 10.4 emulator