emulate or run older OSX on G4 MacMini?

The new Mac Minis have M4 and M4 Pro chips - not G4 chips.

G4 chips were PowerPC chips, and the ‘4’ was a reference to ‘4th generation’. M4 and M4 Pro chips are Apple Silicon chips. The ‘4’ here is also a reference to ‘4th generation’ - but to 4th generation of a completely different, and much newer and faster, line of processors.

macOS Sierra was for Intel Macs only. Macs based on PowerPC G4 chips are far too old to run Sierra, and Macs based on M4 (Apple Silicon) chips are far too new to run it.

christopher rigby1 wrote:

Unfortunately there is no emulation software for Apple silicon Macs except for Rosetta 2 which probably won't run your old apps unless they're 64-bit?

Rosetta 2 won't translate 32-bit applications.

About the Rosetta Translation Environment | Apple Developer Documentation

"Rosetta is a translation process that allows users to run apps that contain x86_64 instructions on Apple silicon."

If Rosetta 2 could translate 32-bit applications, current versions of macOS would need to support all of the 32-bit APIs (like Carbon) that Apple removed when they removed 32-bit support from Catalina.

There are no new G4 Mac minis. There is the new M4 Mac Mini [Pro]. You can only run macOS Sequoia as the operating system and any macOS virtual machine guest must be macOS Big Sur (11.*) or later. No Intel or old PowerPC G4-based operating systems, or applications are supported on an Apple Silicon (ARM) Mac.

Unfortunately there is no emulation software for Apple silicon Macs except for Rosetta 2 which probably won't run your old apps unless they're 64-bit?

On any Intel Mac you could run virtualisations (VM) of older Mac OS as they used the same Intel architecture (e.g. anything from Tiger Server up to Catalina), but not on M4 Mac.

I believe that Adobe offers InDesign for modern Macs and PCs - but only on a “subscription” (rental) basis.

An alternative that would not involve a subscription might be something like the Affinity V2 suite (Photo, Designer, Publisher).

Servant of Cats wrote:

christopher rigby1 wrote:

Unfortunately there is no emulation software for Apple silicon Macs except for Rosetta 2 which probably won't run your old apps unless they're 64-bit?

Rosetta 2 won't translate 32-bit applications.

That's what I said!!!

Note that it is quite possible that Adobe has shut down the DRM activation servers for old versions of InDesign. If that was the case, it might mean that if you did a “clean install” of InDesign on your current old Mac or on another old Mac, the program would stop working.