Phil Ryan <ryanpf@ssmd.mrl.dsto.gov.au> writes in regard to the new PC emulator for the Power Macs that we mentioned in TidBITS-231:

I have had some experience with Utilities Unlimited and their product Emplant, a Mac emulator for the Amiga. Emplant has been in "developmental release" for quite a while. Utilities Unlimited (mainly in the person of Jim Drew, the chief programmer/engineer/president) does support its product strongly via the Internet and the various appropriate newsgroups.

Despite starting from behind in the Mac emulation game (behind Redisoft's Amax Mac emulator) Emplant is clearly the better product, having come out with a Mac-II class machine when Amax was really a souped-up Mac Plus-class machine. Emplant works, in colour, with System 7. It allows active switching between the Amiga and the Mac environments and supports various Amiga screen resolutions as well as standard Mac resolutions. It follows fairly well the CPU power of the particular Amiga that it is on (so a 33 MHz 68040 Amiga performs almost as fast as a 33 MHz 68040 Mac), while maintaining the multitasking of the Amiga.

However, Emplant was not supposed to be just a Mac emulator. It was supposed to be a multi-operating system emulator providing for easy addition of various modules for emulating other operating systems, including DOS/Windows.

I would not be at all surprised if the PC emulator for the Power Mac would be a very good product, be very cheap, and require less of your Power Mac than SoftWindows. I would be surprised if the first release was bug-free, but, like the Mac emulator for the PC (Executor by ARDI) would probably settle down after a while.