Speaking of emulators running Mac OS X, there are some sick, sick people out there using them to do sick, sick things. And by "sick" we don't necessarily mean "icky," although there's definitely an unwholesome quality to Mac OS X running on an Xbox. Mostly, though, by "sick" we just mean "of or relating to the thoughts, deeds, or actions of someone who is mentally ill and/or on serious drugs." And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, it's given us the miracle of Mac OS X running on an eleven-year-old Centris 650.

That's right, we said a Centris 650. Old-school Macaholics will recall that this thing came out before PowerPCs existed at all in the Macintosh line-up, and without getting absolutely nutso with emulators or bizarre hacks, it won't even boot Mac OS 9, let alone Mac OS X. However, as faithful viewer Molasses pointed out, a seriously unbalanced mad genius over at AppleTalk Australia remembered that a Centris 650 will boot Debian GNU/Linux for the Motorola 680x0, provided you're insane or bored enough to make it work.

She was.

Okay, so then she had a 25 MHz Centris 650 running (and we use the term loosely, if not blindingly incorrectly) Linux. Then what? Well, that's where PearPC comes in. In addition to being a handy source for stolen code if you're looking to dupe the world into thinking you've written a high-speed commercial emulation product, PearPC just happens to be a working PowerPC emulator in its own right, albeit a painfully slow one. But it's open source, which means its code can be compiled for Debian GNU/Linux-- you know, like the version that's running on that Centris.

You see where this is going.

Yes, after jumping through a lot of hoops (and engaging in a whole lotta thumb-twiddling), this woman was able to get PearPC up and running on her Centris under Linux, complete with a Mac OS X 10.3 boot volume ready to go. Believe us when we tell you that there are serious performance issues. We've already mentioned the 25 MHz 68040 processor, which was plenty zippy in '93, but these days it's a good ten times slower than the chips found in high-end cell phones. On top of that, whereas PearPC runs 15 times slower than an x86 processor that's running it, when run on any other chip architecture (like, say, that of a 68040) it runs "about 500 times slower than the host." And just to make things interesting, the Centris only has 68 MB of physical RAM, which is well below what Panther needs for minimal breathing space.

Add all that together and you've got a Centris 650 that can, in fact, run Mac OS X-- in theory; you'll have to wait a while before we all know for sure. "At 9 PM on Monday 25th October 2004, a Mac Centris 650 started booting Mac OS X... about an hour and a half later, the familiar Apple logo bootsplash appeared." At this rate, taking into effect the processor speed, PearPC's performance ratio, etc., we're "looking at at least 6.99 days" just for the Finder and Dock to finish launching. "One week to boot!"

Gee, suddenly our 400 MHz G3 PowerBook doesn't seem nearly so slow anymore...