There’s an old saying that goes, “We do not applaud because the dancing bear dances well, we applaud because the dancing bear dances at all.” Every once in a while though, you encounter a dancing bear who also dances well. PearPC – PowerPC Architecture Emulator is just such a bear. I had read about it on Slashdot a few weeks ago as no doubt many of you had, but I was keen to try it out for myself to see if I could get it to work at all and if I could then how well would it perform on a machine that I built more than three years ago.
The answers were that it was actually quite easy to get working, the most difficult part was digging up a copy of Mac OS X to make use on it (as that is really the only OS I would have any interest in running though the PearPC software supports others) and though I had expected glacial performance, it was actually quite acceptable on an AMD 1600+. Below I’ve included a screenshot of the OS X installation procedure informing me of its system requirements. It says that I must have a PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 but I beg to differ 🙂

BTW, one other site not to be missed is PearPC.net. Their step by step guide to getting it running had me going in no time.