How can I reconcile a PowerPC program that runs on Intel on an iMac M3 or a Mac mini M2 pro?

cristianofromita wrote:

I use many software like Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign etc. but the software I use the most is Freehand MX.

Adobe (Ireland) – Freehand MX

"No updates to FreeHand have been made for over four years, and Adobe has no plans to initiate development to add new features or to support Intel-based Macs and Windows Vista. 

Note: Freehand does not work with Mac OS X 10.6 or higher.

…

While we recognize FreeHand has a loyal customer base, we encourage users to migrate to the latest version of Adobe Illustrator software, which supports the latest Mac and Windows operating systems."

cristianofromita wrote:

Good morning. I'm using a 2009 IMac with El Capitan. He's old, I know. In fact, I'm about to buy a new Mac. However, I have a problem. I use many software like Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign etc. but the software I use the most is Freehand MX.

Can some mega expert in these things help me understand how I can reconcile a PowerPC program that runs on Intel thanks to Rosetta and the fact that I will buy either an IMac M3 or a Mac Mini M2 pro?

No 2009 Mac can run anything earlier than Leopard. Many can't run anything earlier than Snow Leopard. Lion devoured poor Rosetta 1, and by the time that El Capitan came along, she was long pushing up daisies.

If you're running under El Capitan all of the time, you may have Universal 1 binaries (which contain PowerPC and Intel code), but you're not using the PowerPC code and you're not running Rosetta. You're using the Intel code, which is native for Intel-based Macs, all of the time.

The problem that I see is not that you have Universal 1 binaries. If your applications "just" had some 64-bit PPC code alongside 64-bit Intel code, there's a good chance Rosetta 2 would be happy to take the 64-bit Intel code, and try to translate it for your Apple Silicon Mac. It's that any application code old enough to have a Universal 1 binary is likely to contain 32-bit code and to also contain other things that will break under the macOS releases which came out after its release.

Can both Rosetta and Rosetta2 be mounted on M2/M3 chips?

A VM has the same basic type of machine code architecture as the host. So you cannot run Intel-baed versions of Mac OS X / macOS in a VM on an Apple-Silicon-baed Mac.

If you purchase a new Mac, you will need spend a lot of money on updated Adobe bloatware. As you financially and mentally prepare to do that, consider keeping that old iMac in service for as long as you can. It will work surprisingly well with 6 GB RAM if you're not using that much already, and consider replacing its original rotating hard disk drive with a quality SSD (meaning, one from a company that exclusively supports Macs — not PCs) if you haven't already done that too.

Other than Freehand you will find that Mac to become increasingly limited in its capabilities. Safari will have problems, Brave won't install, many email services (Microsoft Exchange for example) won't work. Firefox still works well.

Also consider any number of alternatives to Adobe's bloatware. Some are free.

You can’t. You will need to purchase / subscribe to new versions of the Adobe products.

On Apple Silicon (M1-M3) Macs, Parallels Desktop (or even VMware) only supports macOS Big Sur or later, or Windows 11 ARM guests. That eliminates your ancient applications.