[aprssig] Rant - Cross platform portability

Brian Riley brianbr at mac.com
Mon Sep 18 15:02:15 EDT 2006


"Legacy" PPC code runs under a 'sortof' emulation on an Intel Mac  
called "Rosetta" ... I say 'sortof' emulation because it isn't  
emulation in the conventional sense we were used to say in VirtualPC  
running Windows on a Mac_PPC. Rosettta appears to run PPC code on an  
Intel Mac very quickly. (I have he entire MS Office 2004Suite  as  
well as the entire  Adobe CS2 all in PPC code running on my  
MacBookPro with 2GHZ Code Duo and they ran as fast or faster than  
they do on my 1.8 GHz iMac G5 (both machines have 2GB RAM).

If this copy of Starry Night is relatively recent it is likely the  
Mac installer is a "Universal Binary," meaning that it has two forks  
one with a PPC binary and one with an Intel binary and the loader  
selects the correct fork.

---
cheers ... 73 de brian  riley,  n1bq , underhill center, vermont
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On Sep 18, 2006, at 1:36 PM, Stephen H. Smith wrote:

> Instead, I was amazed to see the very same compressed archives that  
> unpacked and installed on the PC, unpack and run with an absolutely  
> identical presentation on a Mac G4.     (The only difference was a  
> different un-archiver/installer  utility that is apparently written  
> in native Mac code -- don't know if it would run on the new Intel- 
> based Mac -- perhaps the Intel-based installer can run on both PCs  
> and Intel Macs)   The program does require as a prerequisite, on  
> both platforms, that Java2 Runtime 1.5 and QuickTime  6.x or higher  
> be  present.





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