I can hear you now. "Oh, goodie. Yet another programming language. Just what we need. What do I need with another language? Isn't [insert your personal favorite language du jour here] good enough?" Leaving aside for the moment the question of why any serious software developer would confine him or herself to a single programming language, let's just say that if you want to develop Mac Classic and OS X applications that also happen to run virtually unchanged on Windows and *nix platforms, Revolution may just be the sweetest thing that's happened to you in a long, long time.
If you're a seasoned professional programmer who writes only for the Macintosh, you may still find Revolution a useful tool. You can use it to prototype user interfaces quickly, turn those prototypes into demos for users to evaluate as you rapidly modify the UI in response to user feedback.
If you're one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people I call Inventive Users, you're going to love the ease of programming and application design in Revolution as well as the way it gets along with corporate databases, the Web, and rich media. (Inventive Users are people who don't program for a living but who are willing to take time to learn an accessible scripting language and use it to create applications they or their departments need or want.)
What Is Revolution?
Revolution, a product of Edinburgh, Scotland-based Runtime Revolution Ltd., grows out of HyperCard, a much-beloved and widely used Apple Computer product that the company abandoned a few years ago, much to the chagrin of tens of thousands of its customers, including some of the biggest companies in the world. HyperCard ran only on Macintoshes and was a strictly black-and-white application for most of its life. When color was added, near the end of the HyperCard life cycle, it was not well thought out and never worked very well.
Scott Raney loved HyperCard but he needed something like it to run on Unix. So he set about to develop a HyperCard-like product for his platform of choice and wound up creating the MetaCard engine, about 10 years ago. Kevin Miller and his Scottish cohorts licensed the MetaCard engine, put a more robust and attractive programming UI on it and extended it in some other crucial ways, marketing the result as Revolution. Recently, Runtime Revolution acquired MetaCard and Raney now works for the engine's new owners.
Revolution combines a powerful, graphical IDE (integrated development environment) with a highly accessible programming language called Transcript to create a platform for developing a broad range of software applications that will run virtually unchanged on Mac Classic, OS X, every flavor of Windows currently supported by Microsoft (and some that aren't) and many versions of *nix, including the widely popular Linux. Applications are in color, take full advantage of native UI widgets as much as possible, and offer performance comparable to Java and Basic applications.
In fact, I like to call Revolution Java without the Java. Revolution delivers on the promise of true cross-platform development better than Java in my experience, and does so at a fraction of the programming time and effort.
Shafer, Dan. (2004). Review: Runtime Revolution, Programming for Mere Mortals. MacTech. preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.20/ 20.05/RuntimeRevolution/index.html
Runtime Revolution Ltd.
Applications
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2020-09-14 / 
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revolution.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
QEMU
