indicate that the emulator will provide an operating environment most closely resembling that of the Macintosh Centris 610, a system based on the Motorola 68LC040 microprocessor. A later version, using dynamic recompilation, was developed by Eric Traut, who later worked on successful emulation projects such as Connectix Virtual Game Station and Microsoft Virtual PC.Īll versions of this emulator emulated the 'user' subset of the 68EC040 instruction set with a 68020/68030 exception stack frame. The first version was written by Gary Davidian, who had originally created it for use on the Motorola 88000 CPU, used in Apple's abortive first attempt at a RISC target platform. It is thought that this aspect of the Mac OS is the first time that such a dual hardware architecture operating system had ever been successfully implemented.

The emulator was completely seamless for users, and reasonably seamless for programmers.

This emulator permitted the running of applications and system code that were originally written for the 680x0 based Macintosh models. The Mac 68K emulator was a software emulator built into all versions of the Mac OS for PowerPC.