On 3/2/11, Mike Robbins wrote:

>How long before some enterprising soul comes up with a third-party emulator to replace Rosetta under Lion?

How long does it take to design a microprocessor family? Years, that's how long.

Admittedly it's easier to design a virtual machine, because you don't have to create it from microcode. But creating an emulator is a very big, very difficult job. And the third party can't charge much for it -- because if it costs too much, then someone will just buy a used Mac running OS 10.6. Frankly, I'm tempted to buy a used Mac running 10.4 -- I'm still using two Classic programs (FrameMaker and, yes, NisusWriter Classic).

A third party emulator really isn't very viable. Someone at MacInTouch suggested pressuring Apple to make Rosetta available as source code. This would be logical. But it would also be revealing Apple code. So it won't happen.

I doubt there will be a successful PowerPC emulator. Someone might make a partial one, but not a rock-solid one like Apple's own 68020 emulator that it produced when it went to the Power line.

-- 
Bob Waltz
[log in to unmask]

"The one thing we learn from history --
   is that no one ever learns from history."