I understand that Parallels was designed to emulate Win OS, but . . . .

[Stuart Cairns]

Is there any method, involving Parallels, to emulate an older Mac OS, on a Mac OS X 10.7.5 platform?
Situation: I have quite a bit of money and experience tied up in a couple of G4 and G5 platforms, running different (but close) versions of OS 9.
Up until a certain point on G4/5 platforms, running early OS X iterations, there was a built-in method of running an OS 9 emulator.
However, once the move to an i5 platform was done, it seems that the built-in OS 9 emulator no longer works.
I'm guessing that it is the actual differences in CPUs that is the limiting factor, which is why I thought that 3rd party emulator s/w might have a solution.
So, any ideas, even those not involving Parallels? . . . .
. . . . . Apart from pack up and go home ;-)
Thank in advance.

 

[Parallels User]

Parallels Desktop is not an emulator, an emulator emulates a different architecture, Parallels virtualises, meaning, it only runs OSs of the same architecture as the host (x86, x64).

You are likely talking about Rosetta which was a functionality (The actual emulator) present in OS X up until 10.6.8, it would translate PPC (the former Mac OS architecture) code to x86.

You can run OS 10.6.8 Server on Parallels, which in turn, because it has Rosetta, can run PPC apps.

Clarification: G4, G5 and i5 are CPU models/variations, not architectures or platforms. G3/4/5 are PPC; Pentium is x86; Core 2, i3/5/7 are x64 (which also runs x86 code).