My guess has to do with processors: i80486 binaries
can run just fine
on Pentium+ systems.
The software probably can work just fine at 68040 speeds, but then when
run on PowerPC systems you have the emulation overhead which drops
speeds to around a IIci (25MHz 68030, think Sun-3) on a 8100/80 (80MHz
PPC601) Some companies didn't want the bother of maintaining two
versions (68k and PPC, especially after the PPC machines had been out a
year or two), so they would compile PPC only- hence the higher system
requirements.
All true, but "PPC" is still a very wide gulf. For that particular package
to specify all the way up to a G4, the earliest it could have emerged was
after the Yikes! G4, so we'll say at the *earliest* the software emerged in
late 1999.
Similarly, "fast PPC" can be defined any way you like, but if we take a
fairly reasonable point and say a second-generation 603e like a Performa
6360 (160MHz), that's late 1996.
So, at its most *restrictive*, this covers three years of Macs, and odds are
the software came out a bit later than the first generation of G4s. That's
not a very cramped set of Macs that can run it, and even larger if you're
prepared to put up with the performance of, say, a suckier 603e like a
(kill-me-now) 6200 series Performa, or a first-generation 601.
I don't think this had much to do with 68K, and given that it had to come
out in 1999 or later, 68K would have been a very distant blip on the radar
by then. I write 68K-compatible software where possible, but I'm a classic
Mac weirdo after all.
--
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http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems *
www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at
floodgap.com
-- People who buy computers from TV commercials *deserve* PCs. ----------------