So if emulation or a VM is your go to. How is that any different than what yuh can do with older versions of MacOS?
On the other hand, only OSX 10.7+ are really easy to run in a VM, and .5 and .6 only work for servers, and anything before 10.5 isn't really going to be compatible with virtualization. That's 2007, so OSX lets you virtualize back about 13 years, and Windows you can go back almost 30 years. People even have Win 3.1 running in VMware.
This is probably due to the fact that there isn't powerpc virtualization software, but if you need to run osx software from before 2007, you're basically out of luck.
You can also virtualize windows from just about any OS you can imagine, Mac, Linux, Windows etc, while OSX virtualization has a hard requirement for running on Mac hardware.
https://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml#pow...
For the most part yes. If you want to run Mac software you need to own Mac.
As far as going back 30 years. Now you’re in the Classic Mac era. There are plenty of cross platform emulators that run Mac software that old.
If you want to go back 40 years. Apple // emulators are a dime a dozen.
What, Basilisk II and Sheep Shaver? PCE and Mini vMac if you want a Mac Plus. For a large array of apps only one of these options will actually work.
I’d been wanting a Mac for several years, but had little understanding of how it worked. PearPC let me try it out and a get a glimpse of Mac OS X.
If you aren't a stickler for Apple's terms of service (if you're doing this for business purposes, I suggest you should be), you can use a tool called macOS unlocker to patch VMWare Workstation to run macOS VMs. Runs great, though all VMWare products can only render display output for macOS in software mode.
I've ran MacOS in VirtualBox iirc, without shady patches―though it probably was in Linux.
It may be more common in Windows, but I would challenge that since Windows is basically free and runs on anything from a raspberry pi up, the vast majority of "hacky" stuff happens in Windows and Linux. Mac users buy very, very expensive hardware to do very specific tasks, and "hack around" is often not a good enough justification for the most expensive personal computers money buys.
I would also suggest that it in the Linux world where running random binaries as root is most common. Found some random repo that claims it's a fork of a good one with a bug fix? Build it and run it!
I was able to import almost everything from my old PPC computers. It's not completely virtualized because is using Rosetta and can not use Classic OS apps. But it is still extremely useful, and way faster than my PPC computers ever were.