Donovan's Brain

PearPC is an interesting project that aims to create a cross-platform PowerPC emulator. I say aims, but even at version 0.1 it works surprisingly well. Encouraged by my boss, I played around with it at work today and discovered a way to get the emulator running OS X in less than an hour. Rather than do a full install of OS X onto the emulated hard drive (which appears to take hours), I created a bootable OS X CD image on a real Mac, then booted PearPC using that. Instructions follow:

• Download BootCD onto a Mac running 10.2 (unfortunately BootCD doesn’t support 10.3 yet). Update – now it does.

• Use BootCD to create a .dmg file containing a stripped-down OS X system with any applications you require. The process took about 30 minutes on a Dual 1GHz G4 (though I wasn’t watching it all the time so it may have been quicker). I used the default size and RAM disk settings.

• Convert the .dmg that you created with BootCD into a .iso that PearPC can use with the following command:

hdiutil convert /path/to/bootableosx.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/output.iso

• Copy the output .iso to the machine you’re going to run PearPC on. In my case I used a 3.06GHz Xeon running Windows XP Pro.

• Edit PearPC’s configuration file so that it uses your .iso file as the emulated CD-ROM drive.

• Start PearPC with your configuration file. On my machine, OS X sprang into life pretty quickly and I was at the familiar OS X desktop in less than 5 minutes.

Bear in mind that a Mac running OS X directly from a CD is slow, so emulating it is even slower, but the process should satisfy your curiosity. I’ve taken a picture of my work XP desktop running PearPC, running OS X 10.2.8. Neat.