Is it possible?

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coius's picture
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Is it possible?

Is is possible to shoe-horn a PC Compatibility card (12" PCI) into a Beige G3 AIO? I mean, I know you would have to remove part of the zip drive area gaurd (the metal wall between the zip and the MLB) It is is possible, do you think it would work? Would the PSU Even be able to provide power for it?

Leave thoughts and suggestions, I would love to do this, as it would be kinda an ultimate hack...

catmistake's picture
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I wanted one, once. Questions.

Doesn't Virtual PC emulating a machine with windows actually run faster than the PC Compatibility card?

What's the latest OS you can run on one of those?

What are the specs of the hotest card in that family (proc & max memory)?

Can it be used to run NetBSD? FreeBSD? Darwin?

Maybe I should reevaluate my interest... ?

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PC compatibility card

I believe the fastest one I have seen is a P-166 CPU and 32megs ram on the card. I;m not sure but either OS 8.0 thru 9.0 worked with these although I may be wrong on the OS and I just threw a couple of those cards away.

coius's picture
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it just dawned on me...

I would have to do it external, as there is no internal A/V Connector on the board for the internal ribbon to connect to from the Card to the board. problem is, I don't have the external cable (from DB-15 (male) to card- to DB-15 (female). So, I have no way to connect it. And I don't feel like spending any money on it. And I know that Virtual PC will not help, as the highest speed you can emulate with a 233MHz G3 is similair to a 486. That's why they have the Hardware emulation. Which i believe was a smart move on apple's behalf. Sadly, it is no longer feasible to do hardware emulation, when you can build PC's so cheaply, that it would cost more to put a P4 (or AMD 64) on a card and slam it into a PCI Express slot, especially as seeing that PCI-X can't really conform to one standard slot. Blum 3

I was hoping to use up that extra slot I have in the AIO, and put it to some good use. that is, unless anyone has some suggestions to hooking it to the Personality card (I only have the stock Audio Card built for the AIO)

madmax_2069's picture
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yea it will work in a Beige G3

You can buy a converter to convert the Mac 15 pin connector to a 15pin vga connector. you can find them real cheap on ebay for like $3-$8 that is where i got mine so i could use the mirror from the onboard video from the beige G3 AIO way before i got the dos card's. i do have only one cable tho but i cant sell it cause it is the only one i have. you dont need the cable cause it was only for if you only had a single monitor so you can switch back and forth on the same monitor. i use the converter i bought from ebay and run 2 monitors

yea it will work in a Beige G3 AIO im currently running os 9.2.2 and have the version 1.6.4 of the pc setup and found the 2.x version.

I have a apple 7" dos compatability card cyrix 5x86 100mhz 16mb ram that runs windows 98 faster than what VPC does on a beige and to top it all off i can play games on it to in dos and windows.

altho its a bit on the slow side but it is faster than the VPC and it uses hardly none of the Mac's system resources it only uses the hdd cdrom and kb and mouse on the Mac. i use two monitors one for the pc and the one that is built in is for the Mac.

all you have to do is hit command-enter and it switches back and forth controls of the KB/mouse to the Mac side and the pc side since i use 2 monitors one is showing windows and the other shows Mac os wich is the internal monitor.

you can be doing somthing on the Mac like compiling somthing and switch and do somthing on the pc side without and diffrence of speed "like you do with VPC cause it uses the Mac's memory,video,cpu". I also have a 12" orange micro 660 and a 12"apple dos compatibility card with a intel p1 166mhz it can fit but you will have to cut the back part of the mobo tray (the back wall or zip drive wall however you want to call it).

I cut about 1 inch of width so i know the metel wont touch the card in any way . once done you can install the card but you wont be able to slide the tray in all the way cause of the monitor case that drops down inside the card will caulse the tray to be sticking out like 3-4 inches.

but it will work trust me on it. The orange micro 660 if the hottest one that was ever made it can take a AMDK6/3 550 with a part that you have to buy to put the cpu on to support the 2.0v and max ram of 256mb pc100 sd ram has a max system bus speed of 112mhz and has a nvidia riva 128 4mb agp gpu on it.

the fastest one that apple made was a intel p1 166mhz max 128mb ram or was it 64mb i think i remember seeing someone that installed 128mb ram in it and a 2mb ati of some sort.

sory for the long and prolly hard to read post(and no im not willing to part with any of them, lol i had to say before anyone asked)

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The dos compatibility card on

The dos compatibility card only runs on 8.6 or older. The drivers won't work in OS9. VPC is a much better solution.

coius's picture
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might actually be

a better choice to use VPC, seeing as I now have my 300MHz AIO Running at 400MHz!
See:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/9549

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Re: The drivers won't work in OS9.

The dos compatibility card only runs on 8.6 or older. The drivers won't work in OS9.

There is a freeware driver called PCSetup2x that works in OS 9. The author got permission from Apple to rewrite them - for which alone he gets my tip o' the hat. The site seems to have disappeared, but I downloaded them last year some time.

And the Orange card has been on my Santa wish list since forever Smile

My alternative idea is a Mini-ITX board and a 2.5" HD in a spare drive bay connected via Ethernet and VNC.

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RE: is it possible?

Is any other OS able to drive these cards? What I mean is... I realize they were intended to run under System 8.6 or below... but what I want to know is if its possible to have it use something other than DOS that is compatible with the x86...

Is it possible to get it to run FreeBSD, for example? or any Linux? or OpenStep? This would greatly increase the attractiveness of these cards for me.

Also, I've got a Quadra 650. I understand that the PDS is identical to the one in the 6100. So for the 6100 PC Compatibility cards, you just take off the adapter and it will work in the Quadra's PDS slot. What is the very best card Apple made for the 040 PDS? What is the best card made by a 3rd party for this? (DOS or Windows cards apply, please include processor type, processor speed, and max memory... TIA).

Can someone please explain what the cables are for? How many cables are there and what do they do? Will the card work without cables, if you don't care about audio out or driving a seperate monitor (I thought they could share the same monitor as the native OS)?

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Re: RE: is it possible?

I want to know is if its possible to have it use something other than DOS that is compatible with the x86...

Is it possible to get it to run FreeBSD, for example? or any Linux? or OpenStep?

Nope. The cards need a driver on the PC side as well as on the Mac side, and no-one's written a bsd/nix one.

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i can run pc setup 1.6.4 just

i can run pc setup 1.6.4 just fine under 9.2.2 and the apple dos compatability cards i have work just fine. one is the 12" pentium 166mhz and the other is a 7" cyrix 5x86 100mhz and both boot windows 98 just fine. if i had some way of taking pictures and (i have no digital cam) and puting them in my gallery (also have no usb2.0/firewire pci card yet). You guy's must have a older version of the pc setup prior to 1.6.4
i have also have found the pc setup 2.0 to support 32bit drivers but havent used it i got all the disk's for the apple cards im running them in a Beige G3 AIO.

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