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An Experimental Classic Environment for Intel Macs

One of disadvantages with Apple's migration to Intel processors will be the loss of the Classic (Mac OS 9) environment. Apple has said many times that the Classic environment will be incompatible with their Intel Macs. While this probably won't be a problem for many users, organizations like schools (who may have limited money to upgrade their sofware) will likely encounter a few situations where their new Intel Macs need a Classic environment to run a few applications.

Enter Sheepshaver, an open source PowerPC runtime environment capable of running PowerPC Mac OS 9 applications. The developer has relased an experimental version of Sheepshaver compatible with Mac OS X 10.4.4 for Intel Macs.

Apple may have dropped support for Mac OS 7.x --> Mac OS 9.x applications with their move to Intel, but the open source community has provided us with a decent solution. When my Intel iMac finally arrives, I'll give this a whirl. Maybe C.K. can check it out in the meantime.