Their NTVDMs were capable of running x86 legacy programs written for MS-DOS and MS-Windows at 80286 instruction level, at best. Likewise, early v3.x versions of Windows NT for RISC had limited emulation capabilities themselves. The third-party x86 CPU modules for Windows NT on RISC (FX!32) had no support for MMX, either. On PC itself, there wasn't much like that, though. Or SoftWindows 98/Virtual PC 4+ on Macintosh. Before PCEM/86Box, none of the common PC emulators supported MMX emulation, except, maybe, Bochs/QEMU which were dog slow initially. So essentially, users of both platforms had to resort to FPU emulators in some way or another.įranke 387, EMU87 etc on PC and System plugins like PowerFPU/SoftwareFPU on Mac.īut back to the SIMDs. The early Macintosh (+Atari ST) emulators also focused on the CPU, too. Pure software emulation of PCs supported 8086/80286/80386 CPU instructions, but no FPU. Or to a lesser extent, the 80486 FPU and the 68040's FPU (or 68030's external FPUs 68881/68882) in the days of Windows 3.x (PC) and System 7.x (Mac).īoth platforms' FPUs were rarely emulated initially.

What MMX was for the Windows 98SE platform, the Altivec unit was for late Mac OS 9 systems.

VirtualBox dropped 3D graphics support for it in v6.1 due to a change on the VGA graphics core under the hood.Įdit: There's another similarity that comes to mind! PPC emulator being made for the current Macintosh platforms.Īll current PC virtualizers start with supporting Windows 2000/XP only.īut even XP support is getting neglected slowly.

So all in all, Mac OS 9 is equally neglected in the software world like Windows 98SE.įor both platforms, the software industry hasn't developed any kind of adequate virtualization or emulation.įor example, there's no commerc. In case of Mac OS 9.2, the platform's original Voodoo was the better Voodoo 2, even.Īlso, Mac OS 9.x had games support for ATI Rage IIc and other PCI GUI accelerators through the APIs QuickDraw 3D/RAVE. Now that I think of it, the situation is more similar than I thought first.īoth Windows 98SE and Mac OS 9.2 had their Voodoo enabled games. Just like with Windows 98SE/Me, Mac OS 9.2 is barely supported by modern emulators or virtualizers (existed on PPC). They are a bit like Pentium Pros/Pentium IIs running Windows 9x, emulation wise. While the classic 68000 Macs are emulated acceptable by now -except for the Mac II, maybe-, Hopefully this will be a MACEM like PCEM.

Emulate mac os x ppc on windows 10