Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer
by tambourine_man on Sunday March 22, 2020 @10:11PM
(#22660646)
SoftwareFPU… Aaron…
I can still their control panel and extension icons in my mind.
Re:ARM-Ed Mac: We Have an Answer
by scarface74 on Sunday March 22, 2020 @11:36PM
(#22661035)
There was an extension called “No Cigar”. It got rid of Windows animations when you closed a window.
It took me forever to realize where the name came from.
“Close but no cigar”.
Apple has already done this. The 68K to PPC transition wasn't nearly as quick as the PPC to x86 transition. They released new 68K Macs after releasing PPC Macs. The apps were "fat binary".
When I bought my first PPC Mac, all of my apps were on an external SCSI drive. I attached the drive to PPC Mac and it ran native software.
If the processor advantage never reaches the point that it can emulate x86 at full speed, then the Mac line probably won’t transition,
Again it doesn't have to. I had a first generation PPC Mac 6100/60 that ran emulated code slightly slower than my accelerated 68030-40Mhz LCII. My 68K Mac was about half the speed of the high end 68040-40Mhz Macs. It couldn't emulate programs that used the 68040's FPU at all. There were third party hacks that you could run like SoftwareFPU (a 68K program nonetheless) that could emulate an FPU.
The high end programs are always the first to be ported. The other apps are "good enough" and depending on how much time an emulated app spends running native operating system code, it won't be all emulated.