In what is probably bad news for Apple (and certainly should have been obvious in the beginning), Microsoft has confirmed to MacWorld UK that the company's newly acquired PC emulation software is not compatible with Apple's new G5 computers due to a feature that doesn't exist in the CPU that existed in the G3 and G4.

At issue is "pseudo little-endian mode", which allowed G3 and G4 to access Intel-format data efficiently. The new CPU appears to need to do this kind of data manipulation in software, so it may require extensive rewrite of the VirtualPC code and may incur significant performance decreases due to this.

Microsoft claims they are working on the problem and are committed to the Mac.