A macOS user discovered that the latest M4 Apple silicon does not support visualization of operating systems prior to macOS 13.4 Ventura, which was released in May 2023. When the user tried loading older versions of macOS, the virtual machine failed to load, with the display showing a black screen. They even tried to create the virtual machine (VM) directly on the M4 Mac, which was successful at first, but eventually resulted in the same black screen, according to The Eclectic Light Company. So, if you need to run older macOS versions prior to 13.4 Ventura, the only current solution is to use an older Mac system.
Unfortunately, diagnosing the black screen issue is next to impossible on the client side, as the VM refuses to boot. The host doesn’t show an error either, as it’s unable to load the virtual machine normally. It’s not until the operating system itself tries to boot that it runs into the problem. The Activity Monitor shows only one active core for the VM, despite the system being allocated multiple cores, so The Eclectic suggests that the failure happens “before the VM kernel boots the other cores, an event that occurs early during the kernel boot phase.”
