PearPC - Emulating Mac OS X on Windows XP!

Head to www.squarespace.com/michaelmjd to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code michaelmjd.
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video!
Today we're heading back to 2004 to take a look at PearPC - a PowerPC emulator for Windows and Linux. Prior to Apple's switch to Intel processors, it was one of the ways you could experience OS X without owning an Apple computer!
PearPC: pearpc.sourceforge.net
CherryOS Blog Post: web.archive.org/web/200709291...
Chapters:
00:00 - Setting the Scene
00:45 - Overview
02:14 - Setup
07:41 - Installing OS X
10:44 - Post-Install
12:01 - Halo Zone
13:45 - More messing around
16:58 - CherryOS Drama
20:45 - Outro
● Patreon:
/ michaelmjd
● Gear I use to make these videos: www.kit.co/mjd
Camera: amzn.to/3ipyKc5
Tripod: amzn.to/3pqxycn
Microphone: amzn.to/35UbkXb
Editing Software (Premiere): amzn.to/39kawfS
Thumbnail Editor (Photoshop): amzn.to/3lVqVN6
● Affiliate Links:
Get a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL of Amazon Prime: amzn.to/2xVmMB3
Get a FREE TRIAL of Audible: amzn.to/44CX7tN
Amazon: www.amazon.com/?tag=teammjd-20
● Music/Credits:
Custom PearPC logo used in the thumbnail created by nexx of the Neowin forums.
Background Music:
"Hanging Out" and "Walk Through the Park" from the KZbin Audio Library
"Mining by Moonlight", "Airport Lounge", "Acid Jazz", "George Street Shuffle", and "Spy Groove" by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com
Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It
Amazon Affiliate Notice: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. All Amazon links that I provide will use my affiliate code with Amazon.
Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.
#MichaelMJD #MARCHintosh #MacOSX

[@YourNotTrustySouthernNeighbour]

And that's how they got the iCarly PC OS right Edit: HOLY SHIT, *739* LIKES?!, Also, i don't need iCarly intro lyrics

[@OverTheHorizon840]

Right

[@stargazersdance]

Yeah

[@mysticaxolotl8215]

So wake up, the members of my nation

[@deltaboogaloo633]

​@@mysticaxolotl8215 Its your time to be

[@andrew.nicholson]

@@deltaboogaloo633 There's no chance unless you take one

[@pastedtomato]

I remember trying PearPC as a kid back in the day, never could make it work as I didn't read the documentation and expected it to "just work"

[@anidnmeno]

me too... until i tried it with the HDD from my iMac G3. it "just worked" O.o 19 year old me was amazed

[@grandtheftauto1233]

Me too lol

[@EnigmaticGentleman]

And nothing has changed lol, all the kids still expect console emulators to just work.

[@KlonoaSulista22]

Me, but with Virtualbox when i was a kid.

[@aquahomeritto]

trying to uncompress 6GB image in FAT32 😂

[@AdrianLee]

If you drag PPC.CFG to PPC.EXE it will run PPC.EXE with the full path of PPC.CFG as an argument

[@santoshpss]

Try saying that out loud. ;)

[@gatto_furry]

... because that's how arguments in drag n drop works.

[@savikone]

From PowerPC to x86 to ARM Time flies so fast

[@masterkamen371]

And from M68k to PowerPC in the mid-90s.

[@Sparkette]

@@masterkamen371 And 6502 before that.

[@m598lmr]

And now to ARM/Silicon Mac.

[@masterkamen371]

@@Sparkette That's a bit of a stretch, yes, they did run 6502, but that was in an entirely different line of products (Apple II). The Macintosh was running a 68000 from the start.

[@GGigabiteM]

@@masterkamen371 The Macintosh actually started off with a 6502, it wasn't until Jobs took over the project that it switched to the 68000. If Jef Raskin had his way, the original Macintosh would have been a drastically different machine. The first prototype of the Macintosh under Jef used a 6502 in 1981. It would have been a largely text based, keyboard driven machine because Jef hated mice.

[@ReimuTukishiro]

Good old PearPC. I remembered I was fascinated by the Mac and tried PearPC on my Pentium D system for a long time...and it then lead me to hackintosh later... Good memories...

[@zdanee]

I have actually used PearPC back around 2012 to resurrect a broken G3 mac with no CD drive and broken USB port, where I installed MacOS in PearPC then cloned the disk image onto the mac's drive with an external HDD caddy.

[@wasppoison1]

I did something similar recently to get Windows 2000 on a macbook, plugged the macHDD to my PC, used RAW HDD Copy Tool to copy a virtualbox machine I'd already loaded with drivers to the hdd after running the first pass of setup, then booted from the macHDD itself in the virtual machine completing setup before moving it back to the macbook

[@zoomosis]

It's possible to do a similar thing with the Basilisk II emulator, mounting IDE hard drives removed from old "classic" Macs on a more modern machine.

[@RowenStipe]

Oh wow, the computer from iCarly!

[@OverTheHorizon840]

The show didnt exist when PearPC came out

[@theengineer-dellconagher]

​@@OverTheHorizon840 not with that attitude!

[@RowenStipe]

@@OverTheHorizon840 Instead of Apple the computers from icarly were Pear (Edit: I can imagine a prop department guy found PearPC and decided to make the show use PearBooks)

[@mysticaxolotl8215]

​@@OverTheHorizon840Bro missed the joke

[@EnigmaticLucas]

@@OverTheHorizon840But Drake & Josh did, which also has the pear computers

[@marvinmallette6795]

I remember my antivirus flagging the PearPC HDD file as an "Archive Bomb". It reported that it was an extremely small and empty file which would expand into a multi-Gibibyte file size when I needed to use it.

[@SaraMorgan-ym6ue]

well that's because it was the Bomb🤣🤣

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

No time for sleep. MJD has uploaded.

[@conc1erge]

+1

[@Coinpopcorn8]

Yeah

[@randomgreekmapper]

YEAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@windowsguy420]

bro it's 6pm

[@tennickjestzajety69]

@@windowsguy420because we are europeans xD

[@TheAppleFreak]

God, PearPC. That brings back memories. I'm pretty sure that Halo didn't launch because the emulator doesn't support graphics acceleration. It's a common issue with OS X virtualization and emulation, as emulating graphics hardware is a bit obtuse. If you can get QE/CI working entirely under software, you've got something good going.

[@jm036]

You will never be a cat

[@TheAppleFreak]

@@jm036 👍

[@TunsaMcHaggis]

@@jm036 and you will never be a decent human being, whats your fuckin point?

[@asadfarraj]

​@@jm036wtf

[@NatetheNintendofan]

​@@jm036and you will never be a meme

[@heclec4420]

Hey! This brought back memories. I used PearPC back in the day. I say "used," I mean "farted around with." It led me to messing with OSX on a Dell Mini 10 netbook which was a whole other project. Love your videos for stuff just like this.

[@comedyreliefguy5112]

Farted around with?

[@OrdinaryDoommarine]

​​@@comedyreliefguy5112he lollygagged, or better yet did some tomfoolery- might i even say shmeckledorfed

[@urk5204]

I remember this waaaaay back in the day! I made one of the config UIs for it out of the installation wizard workflow in Visual Studio. Interest in it flat out dissolved when Mactel was announced

[@yjk_ch]

18:35 I like that it calls "HPFS" volumes, which is the OS/2 file system. I'm sure they actually meant HFS+... and it shows how smart they were.

[@dillweed8591]

Man, I was wondering why this emulator stopped development up until you explained CherryOS. What a damn shame.

[@GooberNoofio]

yessir, dude! ive been waitin' for this!

[@j.w.techchannel]

Great video, and great emulator. I didn't know PearPC existed until now, but it's certainly quite impressive for the time

[@Filipcreate]

Thank you for your great, nostalgic video about the old-school PearPC emulator. It brings back the memories of software like Stardock WindowBlinds (the old-school one) etc., which is also a good idea for the next video.

[@DanyulYT]

I used PearPC on our family computer as a kid (a P4-era Celeron). 10.4 Tiger ran like crap but I remember being AMAZED that modern PPC emulation was possible.

[@technologytime69]

So nostalgia.... Great video 👍👍😃😃

[@direct-music]

This takes me back… I had a Pentium 4 Dell with 768mb of ram and I tried to run Mac OS X on that thing so many times using PearPC. I ended up getting a G3 iMac, G4 eMac, and then an Intel iMac a few years later. Fun times.

[@clashblaster]

8:15 Even QEMU needs a bit of hackery to get sound working on PPC and it's not implemented in the main distro yet.

[@qNoxverty-ys9dl]

was about to sleep, then mjd has uploaded another cool video

[@DRKDNCR]

I got into Mac first running Snow Leopard on my Acer Netbook with Intel Atom processor and 10" display. Originally shipped with Windows XP. Formatted immediately to run OS X. I could only use Ethernet as the integrated wifi was not compatible. It ran fine!

[@ltxr9973]

I remember that! It was slow as hell on the PC I had but it was an interesting peek into the OSX world

[@NewRepublicMapper]

For Easy access, you can drag the CFG File to the PPC Executable then it will open immediately

[@benny21293]

cherryOS is very sloppy. HPFS was the File System used in OS/2 and had nothing to do with HFS that Mac OS used… They probably did the bare minimum to wrap an UI around PearPC.

[@erinw6120]

Well, the guy behind Maui X-Stream (the MXSinc who made it) now fancies himself as a "serial entrepreneur", and of course, is flogging AI nonsense. Looks like he was sued in 2016 for defrauding investors in one of his companies, Code Rebel, and makes no mention of Maui X-Stream anywhere in his online bios.

[@OctavioGaitan]

If someone does decide to pick up this project, I hope they add sound card support and also the opportunity to install OS 9 or even Leopard.

[@MichaelBattaglia]

Great product! Unfortunate about CherryOS. Another awesome video 😁

[@_MasterLink_]

When I was on Spymac (who here even remembers that site before it tanked?) there was a LOT more discussion around PearPC and CherryOS.

[@johnconnery7547]

Nostalgic! I used to use Pear PC on an Intel mac under wine when I was a kid just to see how Mac OS used to be :D

[@mihoshiproductions9809]

Wow, I haven't thought about PearPC in a long while, I used to mess around with it and Basilisk II to play around with the old MacOS versions before eventually getting a PowerMac G4. Good times.

[@sebastiangudino9377]

Y love this channel. Just yesterday I needed to run a PPC version of Illustrator CS2 on my M1 MacBook. The first thing I said was "Is PearPC for M1 MacBook a thing?". Turns out, it isn't, and I ended up using UTM (Pretty program btw! It's basically a UI for Qemu in Mac, and it is pretty friendly). But I made me nostalgic for this one program Literally the next day the smoothing computer madman comes out and makes a video on just that to scratch my itch

[@Lethaltail]

There was a GUI Windows (maybe Linux too?) launcher for PearPC that made the rounds, it might've been hosted on SF as well but my memory of that time is pretty shot. I'm currently messing with the more modern PowerPC emulators, like dingusppc and the mentioned support by QEMU.

[@D0Samp]

To be fair, the standard Qemu build lacks audio for the Apple PowerPC machines as well, and so far I haven't got it working with the "screamer" fork either.

[@zebubble2084]

It works, but it ain't great.

[@adamsfusion]

@@zebubble2084Seconding that. You'll get the sound it wants to play... sometimes on time but most of the time with extra sputters, pops, and clips along with it.

[@zoomosis]

If QEMU can emulate a USB Class 1 Audio device then that should work.

[@hotgarbagellc]

Holy crap, that 9down logo.. triggered some memories... Woah ..

[@pap3rw8]

I remember trying this in like 2003-4. I had a P4 1.5 and it took like 10-15 minutes to boot MacOS because not only was it translating PowerPC instructions, but it had no AltiVec (SIMD) support whatsoever. The Mac OS X about dialog showed a CPU speed of 0 MHz LOL

[@morphx666]

I rmember running it on my HP ZD8000 laptop. I just loved seeing the expression on people's faces, seeing a PC running MacOS X. Priceless! BTW, I coded the initial implementation of a mouse capture/release, just by moving the mouse in and out of the emulator's window (instead of pressing a shortcut key). Unfortunately, I don´t think my code was ever merged as someone (at the same time) did a much better job and rewrote the whole serial/mouse stack.

[@ericwood3709]

Halo would obviously require some pretty advanced 3D acceleration, and I wouldn't think that PearPC has that. Even QEMU lacks that today when it comes to PowerPC system emulation. I think they might be working on Rage 128 emulation, and I sure hope that's the case and that we see it reach a working state soon.

[@inkballpro]

I was always interested in emulating Mac OS. It can be a bit of a pain but really cool once it's fully working

[@appleleptiker]

Oh jesus... PearPC. I barely even remember it

[@classicmgammer]

Great video and I grew up with Windows XP and macOS 10 versions lasted until 2019!!!

[@chrism869]

Omg i actually remember using this back like almost 10 years ago

[@user-ws2me9xm8t]

Thank you for your story

[@Rezzinator443]

As soon as I saw the title of this video, it reminded me of a Linux distro called Pear OS. That was meant to mimic macOS. They got up to Mac OS Monterey before they switched branding. It actually may be the same company. I’m not completely sure. You may want to look into it.

[@CEO100able]

Now that is very interesting! A good Mac OS X emulator I have never seen before.

[@MaddTheSane]

Sadly, PearPC is pretty much abandoned. Qemu would be a better experience.

[@atarixle]

I remember trying PearPC the first time, I ran Tiger. But I was having a brandnew MacBook1,1 in my clauset, but still I had to wait for my Birthday before trying this one, so I ran Tiger in PearPC a few days earlier.

[@xenocide2121]

oh and a side note... there in fact is some GUI's to edit and launch pearpc, unofficially created by users.. not sure if i have that though..

[@Holahelloholahello]

for some reason every time I run the command ppc ppccfg it gives me a error saying "invalid format(file size isn't a multiple of 516096)

[@idubzh243]

Hi, thanks for this useful video. Do you think, I can use PearPC to reinstall my old System 7,5 on my old Centris ? I mean, can I plug the old hdd (scsi) via usb to my PC, and use Pear to perform a real install on the scsi drive ? Of course I need a scsi to usb enclosure.

[@MuseumStandard]

Have you done something with TI-83 calculators? Seems something like this channel would do.

[@bearsdotzone]

That "wintel" machine was the same type of prebuilt I had growing up. Blast from the past.

[@MaddTheSane]

I'm fairly certain Halo needs OpenGL acceleration. I don't know if the G3 Clamshell had the needed drivers or hardware, but I do know that my Beige G3/333 would _not_ because Mac OS X never had 3D drivers for the built-in GPU (ATI Rage, IIRC). And there's no way that emulator supports anything 3D, not only due to its alpha state, but because _very_ few emulators even do 3D acceleration emulation or pass-thru. There is a new emulator on the Mac emulator scene called DingusPPC. However, it is still very new, and probably won't even be able to run Halo (the upper limit they're aiming for, hardware-wise, is a Beige G3 (including GPU); See comment above about Mac OS X support for 3D), but it shows promise.

[@TheNewcastlePilot]

Reminds me of the hassle of setting up a Hackintosh. I can't remember the amount of clean installs it took to get it working (and then I still had no sound).

[@greylike9190]

Mjd has been my favourite KZbinr to watch past year and he never disappoints

[@Postal2Dude]

wake up babe, new MJD upload

[@moduledd]

yo new mjd video

[@ItsYeetsup]

Not anymore

[@duplicake4054]

Good video!

[@SpaceSquid420]

Man I remember trying to use pear back in the day on my celly laptop it was so bloddy slow but super cool. Then a few years after that osx86 was a thing and I was natively running it on that same laptop.

[@SelahattinEmreUgur]

well, good old times, i played a little with pear pc that time later on bought g4 mac mini :)

[@tonytins]

Oh my god. I actually tried this out when I was a teenager. I was able to convince my friend's dad to borrow their OS X Panther CDs, and it surprisingly worked.

[@xenocide2121]

in regards to Halo, none of the emulators support 3D Acceleration, there are some games you can run in emulators but nothing you need 3DFX for. Tons of games much older than halo work on PearPC and other emulators

[@gooberboy69420]

finally mac os supports emulations, i’m still waiting for mac os x 10.7, i wonder when it releases

[@ckingpro]

Emulation is so nice!

[@JohnVance]

I got a couple Apple certifications in '04 after training on PearPC because I was too poor to afford an actual Mac.

[@supermamoru]

the bliss inside the wallpaper is as old as MJD's PC

[@samtallant7023]

Hi Michael I have a video idea for you! Why Not Try Farming Simulator 2008 on the 5$ 98 Pc bc You have not showen it to us in a while! :)

[@xiimo_lav]

do you gonna make video about echelon theme for firefox?

[@HappySimonGames]

you keep making videos about things days after i look into them

[@zakneeo]

we all know its gonna be good when MJD features windows and mac in the same sentence

[@Henk717]

Did you never make a video about Executor? Might make for a fun follow-up to this one. Its an MS-Dos program that I can most closely compare to Wine, if it was meant to emulate MacOS

[@MaddTheSane]

Executor was also made available for Windows, IIRC. It also was opened sourced in 2008, but sadly support for it never really materialized.

[@MrJ0mmy]

great vidoe

[@chrisw443]

I dreamed of macs then I got my mac mimi 6 years later in 2012. I wish i knew about this!

[@Windowz98_]

fire vid

[@mickplayvm]

This cool!

[@zoomosis]

I remember trying PearPC years ago but it was too slow to be useable. I suspect the JIT feature hadn't been added yet. To me it's always been a bit of an oddity since there wasn't much "regular" software for that era of Macintosh that didn't also have a corresponding Windows version. So you may as well just run the Windows version natively. How well does PearPC run on a more modern PC? A video on BasiliskII might be worthwhile. It was a predecessor to PearPC, for running MacOS 7 or 8 under emulation. Unlike PearPC the emulation was fast enough to be perfectly useable. I don't know if BasiliskII is still under development but there are builds to run it under recent versions of MacOS. It also runs under Windows and Linux. I remember running it years ago under Windows XP on an AMD K6-2 350 (from 1998) and the emulator was faster than a PowerBook 190cs from 1995. On a modern PC the emulation just flies, though I've never actually tried running games on it. A good test might be something like IndyCar Racing 2 from 1996.

[@BruceForte]

You're about to make me dig up my old family OS10 machine...

[@Sithedd]

Does this also work on Win 7? Considering the most recent update for Pear is 2011?

[@paulrobertmarino7623]

Question have you looked at or were you even aware of the MoL ( MAC-on-Linux) it allowed you to launch a pseudo VM (container) of Mac OS inside of Linux on a dual boot G3, G4, or G5 machine and had a strange positive side effect. Often times applications running inside of MoL would run noticeably faster than on native Mac OS but the fans would be much louder due to Linux power management allowing the fans to ramp up much higher than Mac OS would natively allow. the easiest way to test it is using a PPC mac with both MacOS X and Yellow dog Linux (you know the distro that ported RedHat to PPC and innovated thing like yum command originally called the yellowdog update manager) from late 2003 or 2004 installed. I used it quite heavily at the time on G3 nd G4 iBooks and even dual G4 towers. Note the documentation on the site (which is still up) only mentions Mac OS 8-9 but it ran Mac OSX perfectly fine without modifying the OS to get thing like sound working like you needed to do with older versions of Ma OS 8 or 9.

[@koigee]

I used to use pearPC on my Windows 8 laptop, and I thought it was very cool for a version 1.0 program

[@Michael-el7iy]

PLS make a review for the bb navigator for ps2 The BB Navigator for the PS2 was akin to an XMB (Cross Media Bar) user interface for the console. It seemed poised to be the original interface for the PS2, but perhaps due to time constraints, it wasn't implemented at launch. But it will be interesting For you to review it

[@VectraQS]

I remember running PearPC on Vista. the GUI control panel required administrator privileges for some dumb reason.

[@Vlame]

I see a MJD video, I click without any hesitate

[@ManleyEvangelista]

I remember trying to install Jaguar using this emulator using a Mendocino Celeron 500Mhz, and it took about 10 hours without the optional components. Things I would do just to get Mac OS X on my computer, and I was a broke teenager so I couldn't just buy Mac or even a more powerful PC to emulate it on.

[@kylespevak6781]

1:29 First gateway into the Macintosh world as a Windows user: This sucks

[@Smarttube01]

I sometimes watch you on warpstream!

[@trctheraulchannel2023isback]

i'll try this on my windows 11!

[@KozenaDrzka]

Will this work on Windows 11?

[@stickfigure31]

@12:01 I'm not surprised Halo didn't work. My experience with PPC emulation (Basilisk II, Sheepshaver, qemu, ect) trying to play the few Mac exclusive titles has been non of the emulators have true hardware 3d accelerated graphics, meaning except for simple 2d games I still need to pull out my bulky IMac g3 or g5 tower when I want to play an 3d tittles. qemu at least reports hardware acceleration to the guest OS allowing some 3D games that "require" hardware acceleration to run, but it's all software rendering and often slow. I read online if you can tracked down the correct AMD card (I haven't manged to) possibly requiring a pci to pcie adapter, you can setup gpu pass-through to the PPC guest. Someone started working on Rage ATI emulation for qemu, when using a build of qemu with that, it enables more 3D games to run with software rendering. However it was even slower then vanilla qemu. Ironically waiting for 3D acceleration to come to these emulators, I have seen the games I wanted to emulate slowly be given source ports on github. So one day it might not be necessary for me to this at all.

[@WillParker322]

Hey, you got my speakers!

[@netheriteofficial_]

Finally, a tutorial how to use ppc, now i can download unity 1

[@snich1950]

Try running Halo from the terminal if it ouput some error. Never tried it on a Mac tho.

[@LuisMercadoorg]

Would the unstable 0.6 have a more mature implementation of G4?

[@briantheoret6837]

can you use a DMG image or does it have to be an ISO?

[@eduardocarrasco8830]

Perhaps I’m wrong, but as far as I remember, OSX was built for both PPC and X86 CPUs. But the x86 official public compiled version started from 10.4 tiger. I never was able to find a x86 version prior 10.4, although Steve Jobs himself told the world that indeed they existed. When he showed the transition to the public he was running a P4 3.4 ghz with HT on tiger 10.4. I would imagine all the x86 clones if this was leaked somehow.

[@raphaeltoast]

Fun question: now that Macs are running off M processors (which are sorta-successors to PPC), could they potentially emulate legacy versions of macOS better than ever?

[@MaddTheSane]

No, Apple Silicon SoCs use a different instruction set than PowerPCs in Macs from yesteryear. Even Dolphin, which emulates a G3, doesn't run on Apple Silicon at native speeds.

[@Noah-to9ei]

Fun experiment for the 98 pc or the hp laptop, try to run Tiny11. If it can run Win7 it can surely handle a stripped down version of Win11

[@Darek-Micheal]

Amazing

[@retrospacenet]

UI design was way better back in the days of vista and osx.

[@kreuner11]

It was a UI design trend from 2001-2013

[@retrospacenet]

@@kreuner11period is called "frutiger aero "

[@jm036]

@@retrospacenet a term that never existed until 2023

[@MaximilienNoal]

Or more generally skeumorphism

[@ItsYeetsup]

​@@jm036 theres a problem with that?

[@crawqxx]

fire

[@EmanuelCampos]

IN 2015 I try the other way around, emulate 386 on macG3, but never got beyond the install scream of XP. I hold my G3 for years, because of the games I had for it.

[@pedropassamani]

That sure would make for an interesting follow-up video! Back in the day I used to run 98 SE under Connectix's/Microsoft's Virtual PC on a 400 MHz Indigo iMac, and it actually wasn't bad at all. I even got a game (Counter-Strike 1.6) to run. It was a slideshow, yes, but it ran nonetheless, which was just amazing to me. I remember even playing a multiplayer match over the LAN with a real Windows PC that I had at the time.