The nice people over at Mac OS 9 Lives have a Mac OS 9.2.2 Universal Installer ISO which is pre-configured and easy to use - it also conveniently includes a few extra tools and apps you’ll need. To install Mac OS 9 we’re going to need a disk image/ISO to install from. There are “screamer” forks but the only binaries available are for Mac OS X so you’d have to build it yourself and there will probably be a whole lot of hoops to jump through. Please note that Mac sound support is missing here. You could try and build this yourself but Stefan Weil has you covered for pre-built QEMU Windows binaries This is a shame as although I love the command-line for its scriptability when it comes to exploring valid combinations of options the command-line is mostly awful (the IBM AS/400 command-line and prompting system excluded). The only “up to date” one I found - QtEmu - only supports configuring x86 virtual machines. There is no GUI however and the third party ones that exist mostly seem to be from 10 to 2 years out of date and many don’t support Windows at all.

With such a wide variety of options and settings available you can imagine it will require some digging through the user interface and you’d be wrong. It’s an open-source emulator that unlike regular virtualization tools is quite capable of emulating completely different CPU architectures from ARM through to MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V, Sparc and even IBM’s big s390x z/Architecture. sit ( StuffIt Expander) or only work with later Mac OS versions. Additionally some third-party fonts are distributed in.

This is a shame for me as that’s where the interface started diverging by adding color and some more interesting fonts.

While James Friend’s PCE.js puts System 6 and System 7 at your fingertips when it comes to later 7.5, 8 or 9 the site doesn’t have you covered as PCE doesn’t support PowerPC emulation (it handles Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 processors). One limitation I’ve run into is digging into old Macintosh fonts. I’m often digging into old bitmap font and UX design out of curiosity - and someday hope to revive a lot of these fonts in more modern formats using a pipeline similar to that for ZX Origins so we can get all the usable fonts, screenshots etc.

Mac 9.2 emulator