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Windows on PowerPC

I need to run some Windows apps on PowerPC.

I would do this either by Wine-like emulator, or by virtualising Windows XP.

Could you please tell me what is the fastest emulator to run Windows XP / Windows app on PowerPC processors?

I have Power Mac 2x2Ghz and 4GB of RAM installed.

thanks

strung

Are you sure your Mac has a PPC chip and not an Intel chip? Pull down the Apple Menu to About This Mac and check.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

Windows requires an Intel x86 chipset for VMware Fusion, Parallels or Virtualbox.

SOLUTION

strung

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strung

This is what there is: http://www.macwindows.com/emulator.html#PCEmulators

Dave Baldwin

"Power Mac" is a G5 PowerPC machine. http://www.apple.com/support/powermac/ If that is the only machine you have, you would save time and money to buy a used Windows PC that would run your Windows software.

strung

Dave is right. It makes no sense to run Windows in emulation on a PPC chip Mac.

mrmut

ASKER

So - it would be sluggish?

Should I not even try?

I won't if you experts agree it doesn't make any sense.

SOLUTION

rindi

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

If you are using an old MAC, I would not forget the idea.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

rindi

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strung

Depends on why you are trying to do it in the first place. If any of the software still available to do this is free, and if you have a licensed copy of Windows, you could give it a try. But if you have to spend any money at all, it would be cheaper to buy a used PC with Windows installed. Windows will run far better on even an old used PC than emulated on a PPC Mac.

Dave Baldwin

I agree with @strung.

mrmut

ASKER

Thanks guys, this doesn't make much sense. It is far too much work, and there are a lot of other dedicated win machines around.

I suppose I expected too much - converting commands from one CPU to another is probably too much overhead as is for the relatively old machine.

rindi

It's not just about the conversion from one architecture to the other. A bigger problem is that MAC PowerPC's are obsolete and the OS "leopard for PPC" isn't supported anymore. That means most software that runs on that platform is also not supported. It's like the darwine project I mentioned earlier, the project works fine for intel MAC's, but for the PPC MAC's it has been discontinued.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

Hypervisors do not work by converting Intel commands to PPC commands, Hypervisors, let the VM actually use the Host CPU and all it's features.

For a virtualisation piece of software to "emulate" and convert Intel commands to PPC commands, would not be efficient, and would be too slow, so it's never/not done in virtulisation software.