With a few exceptions, notably Connectix's RAM Doubler, the emulator ran all software with no noticeable impact other than lower performance relative to the same program when compiled for PowerPC.
The first version was written by Gary Davidian, who had originally created it for use on the Motorola 88000 CPU, used in Apple's abortive first attempt at a RISC target platform.
Prior to Traut's arrival there, Connectix had released Speed Doubler, which included an even faster PowerPC 68k emulator.
Apple developer documents indicate that the emulator provided an operating environment most closely resembling that of the Macintosh Centris 610, a system based on the Motorola 68LC040 microprocessor.
For the programmer, the transition to the PowerPC was made fairly painless, because the emulator was started and stopped automatically.
This meant that dealing with the dual architecture required very little work for the programmer, and just like the OS, applications themselves could mix and match 680x0 and PowerPC code fairly easily.