SheepShaver works on Mac OS X, too, allowing Power Macs with Leopard to run classic apps at near native speeds, though not as well integrated as the Classic Environment, of course. It achieved surprisingly good speed on modest hardware by heavily patching the operating system (more later) and running most programs as native code directly on the BeBox's twin 603 CPUs, not unlike KVM-PR, though without using any special processor features (instead, this was achieved by patching out supervisor portions of the emulated Mac ROM and running all components, including the nanokernel, in the problem state - today we would call this paravirtualization). SheepShaver started on BeOS and the PowerPC-based BeBox as a commercial product and pun on the Amiga 68K Mac emulator ShapeShifter it only runs the classic Mac OS, and only then up to 9.0.4 (later versions require an MMU, which SheepShaver doesn't implement). This is relevant because of the current state of Mac emulation: in general, the classic Mac OS is better supported than Mac OS X.
#Sheepshaver alternative mac os x#
Even my G5 only ever ran Mac OS X Tiger so that I still could run Classic applications (on top of the fact I preferred Tiger's interface to Leopard). With the exception of the G5 all of these systems natively ran the classic Mac OS, so I had a large investment in classic Mac software.
I upgraded from there to (briefly) a used Power Mac 7200, then traded it in for a used Power Mac 7300, then pimped that out, then a Power Mac G4 MDD, the first computer I personally bought new, and then the G5. I first touched a Mac in 1987 (it was my buddy's father's Mac Plus, and we spent hours messing around in HyperCard and System 6), though the first Mac I personally owned was a second-hand Macintosh IIsi. I certainly was, even granting it made commercial sense at the time, and I ended up using a Power Mac G5 Quad for 13 years as a daily driver before I got the Raptor Talos II I use now.
I've always maintained (possibly by personal experience) that one of the natural future markets for OpenPOWER is one of the architecture's past markets: Power Mac users, particularly those who were irked by the Intel transition.
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