With their monochrome monitors, they were an outstanding, if semi-legal, way to run Mac software without paying the gigantic Apple margin. The STs had a similar setup with different software. They called ROM routines, so fixing those let those programs run anywhere. If anything had been poking the hardware directly, it wouldn't have gone well, but hardly any programs did that. Combine that with its heavy dependence on ROM routines for all screen output, and providing a slightly altered ROM pretty much let the machine run happily on any 68K platform. It wouldn't have worked except that Macs were more or less a "CPU on a stick", with kind of the minimum possible hardware to make a 68000 into a viable computer platform. The big advantage was that it natively used the same CPU, so you didn't need a translation layer there, you just needed patched Mac ROMs. The Amiga's native display wasn't done the same way as the Mac's, so the Toolbox routines had to be modified to draw differently, and the sound chips were different. I would still call this an emulator, it was just one with a very thin translation layer.
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