Re: MCL on PowerPC in 68K emulation ?

[bill@cambridge.apple.com (Bill St. Clair)]

At  3:44 PM 1/10/94 +0000, Allender wrote:
>Karsten Poeck (poeck@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de) wrote:
>: I assume that nobody at apple likes to answer the 1 000 000 $ question
>: whether MCL will be ported to the native mode of the PowerPC or not but
>: does MCL run on a PowerPC in the 68K emulation mode?
>
>: regards for any answers
>
>: Karsten
>
>Here is the rumor that I heard:
>
>A couple of our  multimedia programs written in MCL
>ran successfully at Macworld (?) when the first PowerPC's were demoed.
>
>(I wasn't there, so I may be wrong about where/when the test was run,
>but word is that emulation mode works great -- if you don't mind IIci
>speed.)

I tried MCL in the PowerPC compatibility lab at WWDC last May. Though
I didn't run our diagnostics, it appeared to work except for some munged
cursors. Keith Erf also ran his MCL-based QuarkExpress extension, and
told me that it worked except for a munged GC cursor. The munged cursors
were due to a new ROM feature that is also present on the "AV" macs
(Quadra 840av & Centris 650av). MCL 2.0.1 fixes the munged cursors.

I tried timing a simple loop and found that for that particular
compute-bound task, MCL ran emulated on that PowerPC at about
the same speed as on the IIsi which was in the same room.

I have not tried MCL on a more recent version of the PowerPC system
software, nor do I know if emulation has sped up since then.