Or PC
compatibility cards. Got my Power Mac 7300 an OrangePC 620 board.
Runs well, I'm going to stick an AMD on it later.
I agree. I'm fascinated by hardware emulation upgrades. I just bought a
286 board for my amiga should should be here shortly. I'd love to put
something similar in the IIfx or quadra 700. There's also a fairly common
mac emulation board for the amiga. It would be fun to have both a mac and
dos window open on the amiga desktop at the same time. :-)
AST made a number of such cards, and those ones are in fact the direct
ancestors of the Orange Micro boards. You can get Orange Micro boards for
virtually any PCI or NuBus Mac, although the NuBus ones are harder to find.
The 620 is a good all-around-choice because it doesn't need the (easily lost)
cable octopus of the 5xx OrangePC cards and it's cheap relative to the line
because it has software 3D only (though these cards are loved). Plus, most
are upgradeable (mine has a 128MB DIMM in it, and it will have a K6-III
450MHz when it arrives, replacing the crummy WinChip C6 200MHz it has now),
and run lots of OSes (the 7300 runs DOS, W95, W98 and NT4, plus MacOS 9.1,
of course). Their chief problem is only one DIMM slot, and they aren't OS X
compatible, and you can forget about WME, W2K or later, but you could just
buy an Intel Mac if you wanted that.
If I wanted a cadillac PCI "PC card," though, I'd pick the 660. That has
a 3D accelerator as well, and all the advantages of the cheaper 620. The
PCfx! was a piece of crap -- the CPU is not upgradeable and it has no L2,
despite being positioned as their "gaming" card.
I've more or less decided to get a G3 or G4 as
soon as I can spot a
reasonably priced example. The sweet spot for me is somewhere around $50
which is when people seem to start throwing them out.
People are going to start dumping Power Macs by the truckload very soon,
because there is no market for them and thanks to Apple no future for them
either, at least through traditional OS X. For people like me who prefer
the POWER ISA and have a big investment in the classic Mac OS, this is heaven
because any Power Mac can run classic apps, either in OS 9 or Classic under
Tiger, and they are about to become really really cheap.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems *
www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at
floodgap.com
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