“I love my Mac and I love my PC, but what I don’t love is having two monitors, two keyboards, and two mouses. Switching back and forth has become a royal pain. And since Jobs and Gates probably won’t be releasing a Mac/PC combo box any time soon, I decided to take matters into my own hands.” Read the story at TechTV.
Mac and PC, All in One; The Monster Machine
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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That’s a very fun project indeed. But for people like me, a straight switch box for keyboard/mouse/audio/video is plenty enough, I don’t really care to get two cases side by side.
//..and two mouses//
or, two mice?
Everyone’s an editor .. 🙂
VNC works for me. Ok it is not direct but what else do you need your apple’s included 1 Gb NIC for?
… of my AMIGA2000 back in 1988. At that time Commodore sold expansion-cards equipped with a complete x86 PC to get 100% x86 compatiblity. I bought an 8086 populated expansion card with 4.7MHz, 640KB RAM and 5.25″ FD. It was incredible slow and my TurboC/TurboPascal compiles i did in that time took some time, but ist was fun to have a Computer inside the Computer :-).
If I remember the things right, I payed 1200.-DM = 600$ for the card. That was much money fo a 20 year old school-boy 🙁 but less than the IBM PC cost in 1988.
I bet the PC used in the article cost only a little part of that money. Cool Project.
Sun sells expansion cards like that for their workstations. AMD processor, memory, video, sound, everything on a PCI card. Of course, it costs thousands of dollars, so you’re better off getting a cheap PC.
incorrect, Jim, it costs about $500
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=61476
What a ridiculous project! A simple switchbox and you get the same thing. I saw this guy’s segment on Tech TV and his idea of attaching a motherboard to a case is using ZIP TIES! Danger Will Robinson Danger! For the life of me I can’t figure out how Leo LePorte keeps Tech TV on the air. The psuedo-technical people on the show are simply a joke, and most of the shows are just half-hour Best Buy commercials. Bleh! (Ok, I’ll admit that I do watch Thunderbirds on Tech TV)
They havent sold the AMD based processor cards in ages. The new ones use Celeron processors. And it costs less than a grand. I picked up a previous generation SunPCI card (600mhz) for less than $300. The new models (@ 733mhz) cost $495. The performance of those cards in absolutely amazing. My boots NT 4.0 in less then 5 seconds.
http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/sunpci/
http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?cid=61476
It might be useless or a waste if you already have a PC and a Mac, but if you only have a Mac, it might be a viable solution to save space. In my case I have an iMac, this isn’t really a option.
Any of you old enough to remember the MacCharlie? It was basically a PC frame that you plugged a Mac into, giving you the best of both worlds 🙂
This is the most wicked keen Frank-N-Puter!
I may not be one for rooting around on the software end of things, but I LOVED (and still love) the tinkertoys/erector-set/legos nature of building a PC from the ground up.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my G4 tower and OS X, but building ‘puters by hand is FUN! Yes, you can buy an A/B switch, or even a card in some cases, but putting an eeensy weensy PC into the drive bay of another computer is something the makers of either never intended, especially when the computers aren’t even the same platform! That’s so deliciously mad scientist, I can hardly curb my enthusiasm!
Didn’t there used to be x86 expansion cards for Macs? If so, why don’t they still make those? That would probably kick ass
One with an adaptor cable, or even a multiplatform KVM. Cheap enough to validate if 2 keys/mice/monitors bother you that much (or, if you, like me, have more than 2 computers at your desktop).
Neat project, yes… but why?
Deej
Apple used to actually sell a computer (one of the Performa models I think?) that came with the x86 card included. The card was basically an entire PC, and machine could run both Mac OS and Windows. A special key combination would switch you between the two systems.
It was a long time ago (around the time I got my 66MHz BeBox), but if I remember right the PC-on-a-card was a pretty crappy computer.
Ah, here it is:
http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/lc630dos.shtml
The BBC B, a very famous Acorn computer back in the days here in Europe (6052-based home computer), used to have among others, a Z80 coprocessor card that allowed you to run CP/M programs on the BBC B.
There was also a Motorola 68000 coprocessor card, whith which the BBC B really rocked. But it was expensive and not many got it.
I have Virtual PC on my 2 COU PowerMac and I beat many PIII systems!! All in one machine!!!
Neat project, yes… but why?
Because you can I guess. I think it would be cool to have a picture-in-picture mac-beos system. That way I can have a mac as my main machine then have the beos computer using picture in picture mode if i’m just using beshare, but then switch to beos full screen when I want to use more of beos. It would be a nice feature.
>For the life of me I can’t figure out how Leo LePorte >keeps Tech TV on the air. The psuedo-technical people on >the show are simply a joke, and most of the shows are just >half-hour Best Buy commercials.
If you think hard about the second two statements, you might find a causal link to the first.
I just checked and Orange Micro has discontinued them. But it was a PII or PIII on a card that pluged into the Mac. They also include the software to support sharing the Mac keyboard, mounse, CD-ROM, and hard drives with the board.
They were mostly for pre-PCI Macs and OS 9.x and prior.
I would just wish IBM and some miscellaneous Taiwanese companies would start making PPC mobos and processors more readily available. For instance go to pricewatch and click powerPC. I want a powerpc for OSX I want it custom built and I DONT want to pay 400 dollars for a used CPU and 150 dollars for a refurbished mobo. And I dont want to pay 10000 dollars for a mac. Anyone interested we could start a company.:)
The title is very misleading.
Most had a hard on!
Damn, what a tease. Using freakin KVM, what an asshole.
Does Mac + Virtual PC really = a P3, or is this guy just blowing smoke up our asses? I’ve ran Virtual PC on a PC and a P3 it is not … maybe a Celeron with a crappy S3 card, but not a P3
> The BBC B, a very famous Acorn computer back in the days
> here in Europe (6052-based home computer), used to have
> among others, a Z80 coprocessor card that allowed you to run
> CP/M programs on the BBC B.
For the C=64 existed pretty much the same thing.
How do you do Mac keyboard shortcuts on a PC keyboard or visa versa???
I would have a KVM to switch between my Mac and PC already if there were an answer to this one. Any info I am missing?
Two companies are due to release PPC emulators that run on PCs later this year.
Microcode Solutions: http://www.microcode-solutions.com/
Emulators, Inc: http://www.emulators.com/
Microcode’s emulator will optionally come with a PPC PCI bus mastering coprocessor card with either a G3 or G4 processor. Both companies say that software-only emulators will be released.
68k Mac emulation for the PC has been around for a couple years now. I run Mac OS 8.1 on my Athlon Thunderbird almost daily. http://run.to/mes
Did you guys see how much the mac G4 cpu’s cost? The top model (1.2ghz) is $800 by itself. Here is the link http://store.sonnettech.com/sonnetstore/detail.tmpl$search?db=produ…
Even the 800Mhz is $400. I just bought a XP 2600+ CPU for $300 recently, and I’m sure it’s faster. $100 cheaper and there is no way it is going to make up a 1.3GHz performance gap. The Athlon is already pretty good per clock cycle.
Yes, I also like being able to run MacOS 8.1 on my Basilisk II setup.. I just wish that there was a way to speed up preformance on this slow machine. I run it on a P1 166 Mhz, 256MB SDRAM, Windows 2000 SP3 machine. I gave the virtual MacOS 64MB of RAM, so preformance is not bad, just takes about 2 miniutes to boot up. If there were only a way to improve the preformance of it without upgrading the computer. I also wish that there was an emulator that would install directly to an empty hard drive (like a sub-OS) so I could install MacOS 8.1 on it.
Also, what is the latest version of IE that will run on a 68040 processor with MacOS 8.1? Or is there any open source alternative that will run on it? I already checked Mozilla, and it will not install to a system having a 680×0 processor. Also looking for a freeware office suite for this OS/processr combo.
Long before beebs, macs, pc, suns, amigas had plugin “other pcs”, it was fairly common right from the get go on the S100 systems of the 70’s. If you had something like a Cromenco IIRC, you could co host either z80 or 6800 with the other. All pretty silly since they all basically ran variations of the same CPM. I think at one time or another every succesfull computer has had strange bedfellows jump inside.
The free Fusion PC runs quicker on my P1 166 MHz ThinkPad then the open source Basilisk II. But that’s from a DOS prompt and you’re using Win2k. Have you tried out the JIT-enabled Basilisk II?
IE 4.01 and NS 4.0.8 are the last versions of those browsers that can run on 68k Macs and Mac emulators. But there are other minor browsers such as iCab: http://www.icab.de
Support for Mac emulation on Windows, Linux, Be, Amiga, etc. can be found here: http://forums.delphiforums.com/MacEmulation
I remember there was a system for Amigas and PC’s that allowed an A500 or A1200 to be used as the keyboard for a PC. Both machinces ran at the same time and the clipboard was shared between them.
For the C=64 existed pretty much the same thing.
The Z80, CP/M module yes, but not the 68000 speed demon card.
I actually had half a mind to build me an S-100 bus based machine, long ago when my eyes were better and I had more time to dedicate to this.
Anyone did this, dudes?
C’mon guys, some people need a bit of fun
Yeah, using KVM is a cheat, lots of people had done it before (and some maybe better), but it’s cool. Period.
BTW, Thendic France is selling the Pegasos PPC board. Legally you can’t run MacOS X on them, but they’re fairly cheap (as cheap as a PPC can be these days). I forgot the URL, but it was talked enough here, so the site search can help
I’m not sure about a PIII, but definatly a PII. I use VPC and I’m very happy with it. Becuase its uses and image it boots faster than a normal PC, If I want to shut it down and then come back to what I was doing exactly the way that I left it, it will save your instance, or you can shut it down normally.
If you are doing software testing its great becuase you can load up your OS, copy the image off, load in your software you want to test and when you’re done blow the test image away and not have to reload your box, just recopy the non-corrupt saved image.
Your performance is based on how much RAM you have and how much you set aside for the VPC. I found that 256MB of RAM for my W2K VPC runs very nicely. You can run it in full screen mode, and it looks just like your running your Windows OS on a Mac. Most of all its affordable. you can buy it for $99 with PC-DOS and then load however x86 OSs your harddrive can hold.