Emulating Windows XP x86 under M1 Mac via UTM & QEMU #

While VMWare does not plan to support x86 emulation on M1 Macs and Parallels support staff only offers misdirection when asked, thanks to UTM & QEMU you can emulate x86/x64 Windows versions like XP and 7 on Apple silicon right now:

Download UTM, the requisite template (Windows XP in this example), and SPICE Guest Tools and QEMU Drivers for Windows.
Unzip windows-xp-x64-utm.zip and open Windows XP.utm in UTM.
Click "CD/DVD" at the bottom of the window and select your Windows XP installer ISO.
Start the VM and install Windows normally (if Windows hangs after installation with "Please wait", turn the VM off and on again).
Replace the Windows XP installer ISO with the SPICE tools ISO (spice-guest-tools-0.164.iso) and run spice-guest-tools-0.164.exe.

The result is surprisingly performant: MP4 | GIF

Notes

jdb8167 found a few tweaks markedly improved emulation: right click VM in UTM's main window → Edit → System → Show Advanced Settings:
- CPU: Enables all features supported by the accelerator in the current host (max)
- CPU Cores: 4
- check "Force Multicore"
Multicore Processor Licensing

Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Windows XP Home supports one processor.

Verify number of processors and cores:

C:\>wmic computersystem get numberofprocessors & wmic cpu get numberofcores
NumberOfProcessors
1

NumberOfCores
4

/mac | May 22, 2021