VMac and Executor (both on a Pentium 166) compared against a 0 More info is available on Ardi's web site. (The issue here is called little-endian versus big-endian, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels where there is a war between two armies about at which end of an egg one would have to start eating.)Įxecutor's 68040 CPU emulator is very fast because it uses dynamic compilation, which means that for instance within a loop the instructions within the loop are translated once and not every time one single instruction is executed. Not only does one have to 'translate' every 680x0 machine instruction to i486 code, there are also issues involved like the fact that the byte-order of 16 bit words is different between the two families of processors. Ofcourse a PC has no 68040 processor so the first main task of every person trying to write an emulator is to emulate the processor.

On a 486 processor the emulation is as fast as the real thing. there is no Finder interface but a substitute (which the founder of Ardi once called 'Looser') has been put in place.Įxecutor emulates the hardware of a Macintosh with an 68040 processor without FPU and MMU (the latter being provided by the host OS), which puts it in the Quadra class. Also the look-and-feel of Executor (when not within an application) is different from a real Mac, i.e. The somewhat technical term is that they are 'clean', meaning that Apple would have no legal case against them. Ardi never used any code from Apple and has never disassembled or even looked at Apple's code. Development started on a PDP-11 (!) and the first beta ran on a SUN-3.įrom that on the environment was developed into Executor. To have a demo of what the libraries could do, Ardi developed an environment for the libraries so that they could show Word running on a UNIX box. The goal was to develop a set of libraries for UNIX to ease porting of applications originally developed for the Macintosh. The developers literally started with nothing except lots of public information about the Macintosh (like the Inside Macintosh series of technical manuals). To compare these two is comparing apples and oranges (pun intended), however a number of people have raised questions that the following might answer.Įxecutor was developed from ground zero.

Both emulate a Macintosh and both are developed with the DJGPP GNU C compiler. These two emulators have little in common. Executor versus vMac Executor versus vMac

Executor emulator mac