Here's my solution to the Rosetta problem. I'm sure there are people who already know this, but I only just tried this out, and I'm sure there's some newbies out there who'll be happy that there's a solution. We all know there's the partitioning your mac to run both Lion and Snow Leopard. My solution is similar. Get an external drive (or you can buy an internal drive, and then get a cheap enclosure case from Amazon to make it an external), format the drive, and then install Snow Leopard on the external, and then boot it from the external drive. This way, you have your primary which is Lion (or Mountain Lion when it comes out), and you have Snow Leopard on a separate hard drive, and you don't lose precious hard drive space on your primary drive. Then you will have the best of both worlds
@moderngamenewb: Good solution. The only problem is, that Snow Leopard does not support Mid-2012 and newer models (Ivy Bridge).
Yes, but many people have a snow cat inside of a virtual machine. They are dangerous (the cats, not the people). ;-)
Does anyone know if there is the likelihood of a third party rosetta style emulation program surfacing that wouldn't need the fuss of a second operating system? Or would it be too much of a task for a third party developer?
Newer versions of OS X remove certain APIs, so the best option is, that someone uses a hidden version of Snow Leopard, together with a ppc-x86_64 translation solution.
Just downgrade to 10.5 altogether and you have the perfect excuse to buy an iMac G4 1GHz off eBay...(my plan). Oh, and you don't even need a new HD. I have had 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 on the same machine recently for testing, spread over only two HDs. Live resizing / addition of partitions in Disk Utility has not failed me once. It just makes it hard to use Boot Camp.
I search for one every once in a while, but no luck. I don't need Rosetta that often, but I like to have it to be able to play Marble Blast Gold, and a couple of other apps