Q: PPC Emulator

Yvan Koenig has reported being able to run Appleworks under emulated Snow Leopard using VirtualBox. However this may have been on a machine which had Snow Leopard originally.

You can't run Snow Leopard on machines which were released after Lion came out and come with that installed (because of the absence of necessary drivers). I don't know whether this affect the ability to run it under emulation.

You might like to look at EazyDraw as an alternative - please see this page:

http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/aw/page3.html

Can't you keep your old Mac? Do the Drawing there until you have found an alternative that works on Lion?

You will need the retro version if you have AppleWorks drawings you need to open in future. Drawings you don't need to edit could be saved as  PDFs (from the Print dialogue).

Please note that if you have any Database documents you will not be able to open them in anything other than AppleWorks, so you will need to export them as ASCII before getting rid of the old Mac.

Info on databases here:

http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/aw/page5.html