Rosetta compatibility for old HDD on Mac mini M4 PRO

Rosetta enables software written for Apple's previous architecture to be run and is safe to install.

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Rosetta 2 may let you run some applications from that old Mac Pro – if they are 64-bit applications and were coded well enough that none of the nine major macOS updates separating El Capitan (10.11) and Sequoia (15) have broken them. Those are very big 'if's, and I think you will find that a lot of your applications won't run on the new machine. Your chances would be better if you were trying to run Intel applications that were known to work well on Catalina – or later.

Still, some may survive. I'm using a HP 15C scientific calculator emulator that was last updated 11 years ago. That means the final update was before El Capitan came out – and yet, the application runs under Rosetta 2 translation on an Apple Silicon Mac. Hopefully Rosetta 2 will stick around for a while, and not disappear the way that Rosetta 1 did when she was eaten alive by a hungry Lion (Mac OS X 10.7).

the first rosetta enabled intel cpu macs to run powerpc cpu macs apps by translation

the m4 is the arm based CPU that replaced intel cpus, rosetta 2 enables the arm based macs to run intel based apps, nothing will enable it to run the old powerpc CPU apps though

You cannot run any apps from that old HD on your new Mac.

You can, however, read & transfer documents from that old HD to your new Mac.

Rosetta/PowerPC Applications and Lion and… - Apple Community

Is a really good overview of possible ways to get Rosetta applications from PowerPC on later Macs than Lion's release. Since that time another virtualization tool called UTM was introduced that may also help.

Note, the licensing of Mac OS X 10.6 Server is slightly different allowing installation in virtual environments, and bringing back the old PowerPC Rosetta. Getting ahold of a 10.6 Server disc is difficult, but if you can, that may be another way to bring back old PowerPC Apps. As stated though, if you have specific application document types you don't know if they are compatible with the current OSes, ask, and we can help you find a good transition application.

LibreOffice has been a good transition from AppleWorks word processing and spreadsheet.

EazyDraw for the AppleWorks Draw application.

Appleworks databases need to be exported to DBase or CSV before bringing it in a more modern database like Filemaker Pro

For bitmap images, Lemkesoft GraphicCoverter has the most image format support to the modern day.

"Getting ahold of a 10.6 Server disc is difficult, but if you can, that may be another way to bring back old PowerPC Apps."

I don't know if it's still possible, but a few years ago it was still possible to buy the server discs from Apple for 19£/$ but ONLY IF you phoned Apple Support and asked to be connected to the American (Californian?) branch. That's how I got mine so I could install it in a VM.