So tonight... I get home.. like any geek, the idea hits me.. "I should get a boot of that running on my PC", so I fiddle about for a while.. find this linux application in development/released betas.. "Mac on Linux".
Sweeet, I think to myself.. jump on the linux box, resolve a huge amount of dependency issues successfully.. installing zlib, build-essential, all sorts of c libs then finally the ncurses environment.. I should have lost most of you by now, but as you can see, the box was trying to lose me, too.. but I was winning.. I managed to get it through the .configure, it happily finished preparing with the message "the next step is make".
So I run make.. the box totally spits it.. stacks of really firm looking error messages relating to the CPU. Computer Says No.. those sorta messages.
So I google..
Turns out.. for the second, embarassing time, I was dealing with a kinda huge problem that was staring me right in the face - at the bottom of the article where I found this, it seems, was another person in my predicament - http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-700969.html.
Mac on Linux requires, said linux, installed on a MAC.

This happened to me from the other side once before .. trying to get Windows XP running on a non-intel Mac using a program called crossover, which requires an Intel CPU.
It leaves you feeling so stupid, and takes hours of being really brilliant to realize... kinda sums up the human condition.