written in: January-Feburary 2025
while i was doing this i was: very sick

i miss my old powerbook g4 a lot rn (i still have it but it's like 1300km away at my parents' house.) its time for some qemu-system-ppc then i guess

lets make a hard disk to write to first. we'll go for 64GiB.

qemu-img create -f qcow2 mac-hdd.qcow2 64G

we need an installer but unfortunately 10.4.11 wasn't ever shipped as a unified install disk; you need to install a previous version of tiger and then use the combo update to 10.4.11 (MacOSXUpdCombo10.4.11PPC.dmg; you can still get this from apple). to start with, i'll use a the 10.4 retail DVD (8A428).

now its time to invoke qemu to run the installer:

qemu-system-ppc \

emulate a mac99 system topology; use pmu power management, providing USB mouse&kbd

  -M mac99,via=pmu \

use the openbios implementation bundled with qemu. ngl i think this is the default now and has no effect

  -L pc-bios \

boot from cdrom for install

  -boot d \

mount our install iso and hard disk

  -drive file="Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Retail DVD.iso",format=raw,media=cdrom \
  -drive file=mac-hdd.qcow2 ,format=qcow2,media=disk

once the installer splash is up, open a terminal with Utilities > Terminal. we need to set back the clock since certs died on 24 oct 2019:

date 1001000019

and then turn our blank disk into something we can install on:

diskutil eraseDisk "Journaled HFS+" qemac disk0

dont forget to customize install and add X11 if u need it :) you can also safely save ~1.6GiB if you don't need printer drivers, and another 1.1GiB if you ditch language translations (or just pick a specific one, each is only ~100MiB!) disk space notwithstanding (it's 202x!) turning off components is quite useful in qemu - the less you need to copy from the emulated dvd to the hard drive the better, since they're both relatively slow.

if you want sound to work

you're going to need the screamer fork of qemu. it's trivial to build, but remember you can cut build time by only targeting one system:

mkdir build; cd build
../configure --target-list="ppc-softmmu"
make -j$(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)

on macos you will need to pass -display cocoa to qemu or it'll autodetect the wrong display backend for some obscure reason i have no interest in discovering