This thought crossed my mind because there's an used G3 B/W on its way to me right now:
As a long-time PC user recently converted, I'm wondering if someone could jam a Windows machine and a Mac machine into a single box. What I'm thinking (well, that's a theoretical thing. I'm not sure I'm ready to gut both my desktops to try this) is that one could create a plexiglass case, into which he could mount the motherboards, cpus, harddrives, etc by creating whatever kind of mounting devices might be necessary. Put the PCI cards and the drives in two (I'm thinking about mounting the systems side by side, like they were two desktops sitting next to each other). Now, here's the hard part: of course, it would be a pain to have two moniters, keyboards, mice, etc. I know they make switchers for moniters, but would it be possible to install toggle switches on top of the case that could control the moniters and USB ports? (It seems like attaching a cable to the pci video output inside the case and then wiring it to the switch would work for the moniter, but what about USB, sound in/out, etc?). Basically, could there be single jacks in the back of the box for pretty much everything (dual power sources, of course), but with switches that could pop the control from Win to Mac and back?
I know I've kind of lost it here, but nice thing is that you can dismiss me as a nut and not respond. Thanks!
sounds very possible ... you would have to make sure the case was very well cooled though
as for the KVM switch thing ... it would probaby be easiest to buy a KVM switch and strip it down ... you can get ones that do USB and monitor signals ... so one of those would be your best bet
TOM
there was someone trying to do this on the old forum, try a search, i think it was called (the thread thai is) "best of both worlds"
I'd really like to see someone do that!
GO FOR IT!
Mac/PC Hybrid
Don't know how much that 5.25" drive bay PC costs but the same could probably be done easily with a Mini-ITX PC.
You could ethernet the two motherboards together and use VNC instead of/as well as a KVM. Both might be good - as I've heard VNC can be a little slow drawing screens. That way you'd be able to switch to either motherboard with the KVM, and still be able to view the other in a VNC session.
Gigabit ethernet would probably make VNC run faster.
And you could probably try to use laptop boards, but Gigabit on a PC laptop would be hard, but I think that there are GBit powerbooks.
take a look here http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/supergeek/story/0,24330,3413824,00.html
A Mini-ITX motherboard and a Mac desktop motherboard should give more bang for the buck than two laptop motherboards, and the mini-ITX will fit in a spare drivebay. You'll also have standard PCI slots -one on the PC and 3 or 4 on the Mac. Add a right angle PCI adapter if you want the mini-ITX and PCI (GigE?) to still fit in a single bay.
Power supply - is it better to run both from one, or separately?
You'll need at least one separate hard drive for each.
http://www.mini-itx.org
If you want to network these two boards with anything else, it might be useful to add either a small GigE switch/router internally, or another ethernet card in the Mac.