Hello:
Right now I have no idea what one would cost, or where to even obtain one. However an Apple Representative made me aware of the card's existence yesterday. I thought I would launch a trial balloon to see what information others might share, and then determine if I still am in the market to make the purchase.
I was not aware of any PCI cards put out a while back by a company called Orange Micro. According to an Apple Rep. the card is placed into a PCI slot to allow Macs to run Windows ... an important feature for school labs, etc. ... before the new Intel Based Macs became available. Apparently the schools and other institutions payed a premium price to have that dual operating system ability, too!
Now that the New Macs are designed to run both systems, I am wondering if there are many of those cards making their way to the used market at nominal costs.
Does anyone know the current price range and/or venders that carry that PCI card as pulls from working systems, etc.?
I have seperate PC and Mac computers that work fine for me. However the card does seem like an interesting novelty (now that the new Macs can do the same thing as a standard feature.)
This in not a high priority item for me to purchase. Rather, it would be fun to have Windows running on an old Mac to "show off" or be able to brag my old Mac can run Windows, also! Got to have some fun now and then (;-)
(I will be picking up a G-4 450 tower with Tiger, 1 Gig Ram, and a 60GB drive at an extremely good price this coming week. This would be an interesting feature to add ... but in no way a necessary feature for my purposes.)
David Johansson
Have you tried Google yet? There were many types of these cards over the years, from OM and Apple and others. Most are not worth the time to bother with. I'm not aware of any that had more than a P166 on them. Most of these cards became obsolete when software emulation became more feasible. A fast Mac an emulate a PC faster than the card can, and have any features the programmer wants to put in, not just what the card is capable of. They're an interesting idea, for the novelty effect. Once that's worn off, you can do more with a free-$20 PC than what the card is capable of.
I poked around on ebay for a short time, but found none up for sale.
I did very little other research, but thought I would post here to see if the items are even available and/or worth trying to obtain.
Vintage Macs does have some info. on the different models.
http://www.vintagemacworld.com/omweb/opc660.html links to what appeared to be the most "modern" release before the company went belly up. Apparently it would support an AMD K2 processor that I have already.
But you are correct on your comments, to be sure.
Here is another interesting link found by Googling with
"orange micro card windows"
http://www.macwindows.com/emulator.html#PCEmulators
It is just for the novelty and playing around value only.
Will either use my Darkside Dell Inspiron 9300, or plunk down the money for the new Intel Macs if I really want to do anything serious with PC Applications.