Q is a free emulator

Emulator

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...

 software that runs on Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

, including OS X on PowerPC

PowerPC

PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...

. Q is Mike Kronenberg's port of the open source and generic processor emulator QEMU

QEMU

QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures....

. Q uses Cocoa

Cocoa (API)

Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface for the Mac OS X operating system and—along with the Cocoa Touch extension for gesture recognition and animation—for applications for the iOS operating system, used on Apple devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and...

 and other Apple

Apple Computer

Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

 technologies, such as Core Image

Core Image

Core Image is a pixel-accurate, near-realtime, non-destructive image processing technology in Mac OS X. Implemented as part of the QuartzCore framework of Mac OS X 10.4 and later, Core Image provides a plugin-based architecture for applying filters and effects within the Quartz graphics rendering...

 and Core Audio

Core Audio

Core Audio is a low-level API for dealing with sound in Apple's Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. It includes an implementation of the cross-platform OpenAL library....

, to achieve its emulation. Q can be used to run Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, or any other operating system based on the x86 architecture

X86 architecture

The term x86 refers to a family of instruction set architectures based on the Intel 8086 CPU. The 8086 was launched in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit based 8080 microprocessor and also introduced segmentation to overcome the 16-bit addressing barrier of such designs...

, on the Macintosh.

Q is available as a Universal Binary

Universal binary

A universal binary is, in Apple parlance, an executable file or application bundle that runs natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64-based Macintosh computers; it is an implementation of the concept more generally known as a fat binary.With the release of Mac OS X Snow...

 and, as such, can run on Intel or PowerPC based Macintosh systems. However, some target guest architectures are unsupported on Lion (due to the removal of Rosetta) such as SPARC, MIPS, ARM and x86_64 since the softmmus are PowerPC only binaries.

Unlike QEMU, which is a command-line application, Q has a native graphical interface for managing and configuring virtual machines.

See also

• qcow
  Qcow
  qcow stands for "QEMU Copy On Write" and denotes a disk storage optimization strategy that delays allocation of storage until it is actually needed. QEMU is an emulator and virtual machine container, and it can use a variety of virtual disk images which are generally associated with specific guests...
  
  
• Comparison of platform virtual machines
• SPIM
  SPIM
  SPIM is a MIPS processor simulator, designed to run assembly language code for this architecture. The program simulates R2000 and R3000 processors, and was written by James R. Larus while a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...
  
  
• Emulator
  Emulator
  In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates the functions of a first computer system in a different second computer system, so that the behavior of the second system closely resembles the behavior of the first system...
  
  
• QEMU
  QEMU
  QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures....
  
  

External links

• Q [kju:] - the new homepage of the Q project
• MacUpdate listing
• The QEMU forum for Mac OS X
• Boot Camp, Q/QEMU, Parallels: Pros/cons InfoWorld (April 17, 2006)