Yep. My timeline/memory was wrong. It was the 68k to PowerPC. Intel required dual binaries. Thanks for the correction.
> On Jun 10, 2020, at 8:26 PM, David Riley <fraveyd...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Not quite. When they switched to PowerPC, that was the case; the initial one > was a table-driven instruction translator in ROM originally written for the > M88k, which had been the original target before Motorola canned it, but it > was apparently a relatively simple thing to change the translations to > PowerPC instructions (only took a weekend according to legend, but, well, > legends). It eventually evolved into something much more sophisticated and > performant. > > The transition from PowerPC to Intel ended the Classic VM environment that > ran Mac OS 9, which included the old 68k translator in the ROM file. On a > PowerPC Mac running OS X 10.4 (including G5s, which are 64-bit!), you can run > 68k apps from the dark ages just fine (as long as they didn't use > undocumented interfaces, etc). I've been doing exactly this recently while > porting a very old Mac game to modern systems. > > Anyway, no Classic support on Intel, thus no 68k either (and PowerPC only for > OS X apps). The PowerPC emulation for Intel (Apple called it "Rosetta") was > a licensed third-party product that used JIT-style compilation, but it really > only worked for userland programs; it didn't support drivers and it > presumably wasn't close enough to the real deal to support the Classic > environment, so they dropped it in all Intel versions of Mac OS (10.5 dropped > it for PowerPC as well for reasons I don't quite understand, since that was > the last PowerPC version). > > Anyway, given that the PowerPC translation on Intel only lasted through 10.6, > and Apple just dropped 32-bit Intel support in 10.15, I would expect > backwards compatibility support for Intel apps (if they're even planning it) > to drop within 2-3 revisions of macOS after the transition. Just putting > that out there. > >> On Jun 10, 2020, at 8:47 PM, Robert Engels <reng...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: >> >> When Macs first switched to Intel the OS included a Motorola 68k emulator so >> that existing Mac binaries would run. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/F52A2A9B-EC30-4C9B-BA9F-1B342F7AC668%40ix.netcom.com.
