A while back I wrote a program that checks if the machine I’m running the program on is little or big endian. In order to check that the program recognizes a big endian machine, I needed to setup such a machine, and run my program on it. This is how:

  1. Go to https://people.debian.org/~aurel32/qemu/mips/, download debian_squeeze_mips or debian_whezzy_mips , and vmlinux-3.2.0.4-5kc-malta to your machine.

  2. In order to copy your files to the big endian machine: 
    sudo mount -o loop /home/<your_user>/floppy /mnt/tmp

    Then copy your files to /mnt/tmp.

  3. In order to start the machine: 
    qemu-system-mips64 -M malta -kernel vmlinux-2.6.32-5-5kc-malta -hda debian_squeeze_mips_standard.qcow2 -append "root=/dev/sda1 console=tty0" -drive file=/home/<your_user>/floppy,if=floppy,format=raw,index=0

    or (depends if you downloded squeeze or wheezy):

    qemu-system-mips64 -M malta -kernel vmlinux-3.2.0-4-5kc-malta -hda debian_wheezy_mips_standard.qcow2 -append "root=/dev/sda1 console=tty0" -drive file=/home/<your_user>/floppy,if=floppy,format=raw,index=0

    The password of root is root.

  4. Mount the floppy: 
    modprobe floppy
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

    Then just cd to /mnt/floppy, transfer your files from there to the machine and use them.