High Sierra on Apple Silicon (M1) Macbook with Monterey

I need to run some old (32bit) apps on my M1 MacBook (2021) with Monterey. It is my understanding that with Parallels it should be possible to install High Sierra in a virtual machine, and then run my apps there. However, I have no luck installing the old macOs in Parallels, as I always get the error message "The specified image cannot be used because your Mac is equipped with the Apple M1 chip that doesn't support Intel-based operating systems" - sure thing, that's why I buy Parallels! Can anyone please point me to instructions on how to install High Sierra on an M1 machine? Thanks a lot in advance!

 

I see, that must have changed some time ago. When Parallels hit the market in the 2000s, I had bought several licenses it to run windows on my powerPC Macs. NOT requiring the same processor architecture was the whole point back then. Why would I need a virtualizer if it doesn't do this? Then I can just as well install a different OS natively, e.g. on an external disk.
Never mind, this saves me a lot of money that I would happily have given to Parallels. Thanks for pointing me to QEMU, I'll try that out - performance is not an issue for my applications.

 

I agree that this seems odd. I would have thought the VMs would have hardware abstractions layers that would allow running of older systems on new hardware. Does anyone know if one can run Parallels 15 (which supposedly supports running High Sierra) on an M1 Mac via Rosetta? I believe Rosetta is designed to run Intel instruction set code on the M1 chip.

 

No. You can't run Parallels Desktop 15 on a M1.
Parallels is a hypervisor for virtualization. Not an emulator.