[Ham-Mac] MacOS X x86 Intel Support

[Chris Smolinski]

>
>Chris, How much trouble will it be to maintain both PPC and Intel 
>Mac software over the next say 5 years?  Do you see any problems for 
>PPC owners?  Will the PPC be obsolete sooner than later?
>

I imagine it will be much like the 68K -> PPC transition a decade 
ago. Supposedly Rosetta will make PPC code run on the x86 machines, 
so existing s/w will continue to work. Developers will start to 
release native x86 programs (I understand there is going to be 
something similar to the "Fat Binary" from the 68K/PPC days). 
Eventually no one will release PPC programs, much as no one releases 
68K programs today.

It was not much trouble to maintain both 68K and PPC software, as the 
same source code was typically used for both (possibly with some 
conditional compilation for certain specific things for each 
platform). Of course it is twice as much work to test both versions...

One question I have is how long will PPC (and even 68K) emulation 
continue to exist? Hopefully forever, or at least a very long time ;-)

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Chris Smolinski
Black Cat Systems
http://www.blackcatsystems.com