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1994 68k --> PPC 2006 PPC --> x86 As I recall, the first switch had the issue of the early PPC chips, 601, was kind of slow, and the boxes not designed well. T

1994 68k --> PPC 2006 PPC --> x86 As I recall, the first switch had the issue of the early PPC chips, 601, was kind of slow, and the boxes not designed well. The second transition in 2006 was annoying because Adobe doesn't like to rewrite their code... they carbonized, and then just kept charging for the same cruft. But frankly, I liked the Classic Environment, and I liked the first Rosetta. I'd like to run the whole shebang in MAME on whatever hw, if others were doing it to make it easier for me. If only MAME had a emulated coprocessor, I'd run A/UX on it. Apple's current ARMs and OS running on it are already quite amazing, IMHO. So I don't think the new ARM Macs could disappoint. And the same thing here, Universal Binaries, a switch in the compiler to make it easy for devs, and I don't know how it could be easier.

klodolph 6y ago
> As I recall, the first switch had the issue of the early PPC chips, 601, was kind of slow, and the boxes not designed well. I had a first-generation PPC Mac. It was pretty good, I thought. The baseline 601 ran at 60MHz and had a superscalar architecture with 16K instruction / 16K data L1 cache. The high-end 68Ks were not superscalar, ran at 33MHz, and had 4K instruction / 4K data caches. If anything was slow it was probably because big chunks of code were 68K. My personal experience was that once I switched to PPC, running the same software on 68K felt slow by comparison.
- catmistake 6y ago
  That's interesting. I didn't get to touch a 601 until the 604 were common, side by side in a commercial environment, the older machines gunked with more use (old installs) and more users over time, thus my opinion is biased and worthless. Thank you for posting.