Meantime the answer to the big question on Apple Computer Inc’s plans to license Macintosh System for the PowerPC to other manufacturers appears to be that despite what it was saying last summer, it does intend to license the ROMs for the PowerPC Macs, including the 68LC040 emulator, Stephen Howard, senior news editor at MacWeek tells us. He says the software takes 68000 instructions and translates them into RISC ones, and that Apple has already licensed it to DayStar Digital Inc, which makes PowerPC upgrade boards for current Macs. He notes that while Apple’s emulator is extremely good and pretty amazingly fast, it is relatively slow compared with native RISC code. The PowerPC ROMs also include a mixed mode manager that enables programs to have both 68000 and PowerPC code in them, and routes each instruction to the appropriate destination – emulator or main CPU.
