Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

The fastest (Mac) Photoshop Machine in 1996 was not a Mac at all and not running PPC either. Apple never transitioned from 68040 processors in their high end Macs to 68060 processors, instead opting for PPC processors.

But since Photoshop 4 was made for 680x0 processors, the PPC had to run software emulation. So the fastest abomination was a Commodore Amiga 4000 with DMA-transfer SCSI-II drives, third party (super expensive) 68060 CPU upgrade, (super expensive) third party 24-bit graphics card add-on, (awkward installation) running a Macintosh 68k Emulator! (Shapeshifter if I recall.) It could even run dual monitors, with the Amiga OS still running on one monitor and the Mac on the other monitor.

You would run up to Mac OS 7 on this thing.

Another insane tidbit. If you run NetBSD on 680x0 hardware, there is an emulator (Basilisk II) which gives you a virtualised classic Mac running at native speed - no CPU emulation.)

Edit: even with all the expensive Amiga upgrades, if I recall correctly, it was all still a lot cheaper than the near-equivalent Mac... of course, already in 1998, the situation was different. Photoshop on PC was well supported and PCs were fast and the PPC Macs had gained speed, too.

I remember running Mac software on my A4000-040. It was smoother than on real 68k macs, likely due to the co-processors the Amiga had. I didn't use the emulator much as I found most things just as good or better on the Amiga side of things, with an asteroid shooter, Maelstrom, as an exception - loved that game :)

You might be interested in the Maelstrom GPL port.

https://github.com/libsdl-org/Maelstrom

As far as I can tell, Photoshop 3 in 1994 had a PowerPC version? If 68k emulation was a bottleneck, wouldn't they be testing Connectix Speed Doubler's improved emulator as an option alongside more exotic things like the DSP card?

Yes, I think you are right - but the explanation (this is a long time ago, so hazy memories) was the following scenario: you had invested in some Photoshop plugins, or there were some stock filters/plugins inside Photoshop which were not yet optimised for PPC. You wanted them to go fast, so you stayed on m68k for a while until the vendors sorted it out.

Also myth and lore was much more an everyday part of life then. It was hard to come by accurate information. I was really geeky, yet I never heard of the Speed Doubler until today. It indeed seems to be a very clever product, essentially JIT compiling 68k code?!

Correct - the main application would move to a new CPU/OS much MUCH faster than some or all of the filters/plugins, and many more were not part of Photoshop at the time.

You'd have things that are now considered standard tools that would be implemented by a plugin; I recall companies in the early 2000s that still had older Macs around for a particular plugin for a particular customer, as it never migrated.

Even now you have that problem; I have a photoshop plugin for x86 that hasn't moved to a M1 native yet.

The built-in MacOS 68k emulator also used dynamic recompilation starting with the PCI PowerMacs (introduced starting in 1995)

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