MacOS – Run Rosetta on macOS Sierra

kernelmacospowerpcrosetta

I'm wondering if there is any way to run Rosetta on macOS Sierra. In this post, someone mentioned that Rosetta may uses the Carbon framework, which appears to exist in up to macOS Sierra. Are there any missing frameworks in macOS Sierra that Rosetta requires?

I'll attempt to install Rosetta on macOS Sierra soon, and will update the question after doing so


Update: it turns out that Rosetta is a file named translate which is placed in /usr/libexec/oah/. When running /usr/libexec/oah/translate, either as when installed by the Snow Leopard Rosetta installer, and installed by Pacifist, I get Killed: 9. But, when running ~/Downloads/Rosetta/usr/libexec/oah/, which was extracted by Pacifist, I get the following:

$ ~/Downloads/Rosetta/usr/libexec/oah/translate
objc[21035]: Objective-C garbage collection is no longer supported.
Abort trap: 6

After looking more into Rosetta.pkg (which isn't actually located in Optional Installs.mpkg somehow), I noticed that aside from postinstall and preinstall scripts, there was a folder named postinstall_actions which contained a script named registerRosetta. Here are the contents of that script:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$3" == "/" ]; then
    logger -p install.info Registering Rosetta
    /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate
fi

So, I decided to backup /usr/sbin/sysctl and then try running part of the script. This is what happened:

root# /usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate
sysctl: unknown oid 'kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc'

I don't know about this stuff, but it looks like something is missing.


Update 2:
I've discovered this discussion about getting Rosetta to run on OS X Lion, which unfortunately seemed to stop in 2011, without having provided (as far as I could understand) a conclusion to whether Rosetta can be run on OS X Lion. I'm going to look into modifying macOS more, to make this work. I have no idea how much is going to need to be done, but I can hopefully get an idea by continuing where the discussion on InsanelyMac forums left off.

Best Answer

You can try installing Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) in VirtualBox. I was able to do this using an iMac (21.5 inch, Mid 2011) with High Sierra installed. I was able to install and use Adobe Create Suite 2 in a Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) virtual machine. Adobe Create Suite 2 requires the installation and use of Rosetta.

VirtualBox is a free application. I can not longer find the link to buy Snow Leopard from Apple. Used DVDs are available or you can refer to this answer.

Below is a link for the license for Snow Leopard. As far as I can tell, Apple requires the use of a Mac to run Snow Leopard. There is no mention of whether or not the Mac uses a virtual machine.

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/osx_snow_leopard_sec_upd.pdf