However, Apple's license to continue to use this technology expired with new releases of OS X commencing with Lion (and now Mountain Lion). Originally licensed by Apple when it migrated from the PowerPC CPU platform that it had used from the mid-1990's until the Intel CPU platform in 2006, Rosetta allowed Mac users to continue to use their library of PPC software transparently in emulation. Unfortunately you got caught up in the minor miracle of Rosetta. Here is my complete answer for the OP's benefit: It is slow and iffy.Ĭontrary to intuitive thought, many PowerPC apps running in Snow Leopard Server in Parallels on today's modern day CPU's (i5, i7, etc.) actually run faster than they did on their native G4, or G5, etc. unless you follow Niel's suggestion for emulation.