PearPC

PearPC is an emulator of a complete Power Mac computer on x86 computers. The name Pear (English for pear) is a pun that refers to Apple (Apple).

PearPC emulates currently either a PowerPC G3 or G4 processor, an IDE interface, mouse and keyboard, network cards and a PCI graphics card. Compatible operating systems are the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X, Darwin and various Linux versions. The emulated computer is capable idea to use an Internet connection of the host computer through its network map.

For the implementation of the PowerPC instruction set two different CPU modules can be used. A platform- independent interpreter allows PearPC to use on any architectures, but is very slow ( about a factor of 500). For x86 CPUs there is a specially optimized JIT compiler, which reaches a speed of about 10 percent. For production use PearPC is not suitable. Since December 2005, the development is due to the availability of Mac OS X for Intel processors is moving very slowly. With the release of version 10.6 "Snow Leopard" in August 2009, Mac OS X is no longer available for the PowerPC architecture.