PowerPC Applications on Lion

doodah · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:00

A colleague of mine has just upgraded her MBP to Lion (around a year+ old so guessing it is a C2D) but cannot get a program called FinchTV to work. It is a PowerPC application and by the looks of it Lion has ditched PowerPC emulation. We emailed the FinchTV developers, they replied "FinchTV does not support Intel CPUs". Slightly confusing. Is there any way around using PowerPC applications on Lion?

Brian8bit · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:22

Snow Leopard only supported PPC through Rosetta (which I think is an optional download or supplied on either the install disc or on additional programs disc). But they've completely dropped it in Lion.

doodah · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:40

Can Rosetta be installed on Lion?

QwaF · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:44

Not via legitimate channels.

doodah · 3 Aug 2011 at 09:57

Are there any legitimate Rosetta alternatives? My colleague probably won't be comfortable doing it the Del Boy way.

Skyboat · 3 Aug 2011 at 11:41

SOL, unfortunately

Feek · 3 Aug 2011 at 13:12

I think FinchTV is the problem rather than Lion. I don't know what FinchTV is or what it does but it strikes me as somewhat shortsighted of them to limit the number of computers that can run their application in this way. It was pretty obvious when Snow Leopard didn't have Rosetta by default that PPC support would be going soon and when Lion was announced we were told that Rosetta was dead.

Vonhelmet · 3 Aug 2011 at 13:42

Feek said:
I think FinchTV is the problem rather than Lion. I don't know what FinchTV is or what it does but it strikes me as somewhat shortsighted of them to limit the number of computers that can run their application in this way. It was pretty obvious when Snow Leopard didn't have Rosetta by default that PPC support would be going soon and when Lion was announced we were told that Rosetta was dead.

Now be fair, the change was only announced 6 years ago and implemented 5 years ago. Give them some time!

doodah · 3 Aug 2011 at 13:43

FinchTV = "DNA sequencing chromatogram trace viewer". Never used it myself as I am not directly involved with the research my department carries out.

It is a shame. Still puzzled as to why they said it does not support Intel processors

.

Skyboat · 3 Aug 2011 at 14:47

If their developers really are that stubborn, then I guess the only alternative would be to run it in a virtual environment, or offload it to another machine that is running Windows, Linux or Solaris.