Hi guys. If you have been following along over on 68kmla, I conquested one of these beasts a couple weeks ago. I discovered I already have a DOS card, and a cable for it. I popped it open and discovered it has a Sonnet Crescendo G3 250mhz with 512k of cache. Mac OS 8.6 picks it up as 266mhz, and there is only 256k of cache.

I have been playing with the DOS card, added a 32mb RAM stick to it, up from 8mb, and have been running Windows 3.1 and 95 on it. I like it a lot, but I can only have 1 in the slot. No, I can't daisy chain the DOS card off the sonnet, as the sonnet is nubus, and has a nubus passthrough, but the DOS card is PDS and has a nubus to PDS right angle adapter/riser card.

Oh, and I have the max 72mb of RAM in the 6100, so I could just run Virtual PC, but that is slower, and I like having the joystick port for my sidewinder.

So, which one will stay, and which one will go?

I vote for the Sonnet card.

If you are using Apple System Profiler to tell you about it, you should know that ASP isn't always accurate with 3rd party upgrades. Try using Metronome instead.

Also, FYI, both cards are PDS. The Sonnet card isn't NuBus. The DOS card is on a 90 degree angle adapter and riser. The adapter for the DOS card adapts the 6100's PDS to a 68040 PDS because the DOS card is a 68040 PDS card.

I've always thought it would be an interesting exercise to daisy chain a DOS card off the PDS pass-through on a G3 card, but there's nowhere near enough room in a 6100 to attempt that...

Whatever you choose to keep, I'm sure you'll have lots of fun!

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

It depends on your use of the system.

If you want it for historical value, I'd do the DOS card (I have an official branded "Power Mac 6100/66 DOS Compatible", and it's fun to run the dual OSes,) whereas if you want a fast funcitonal system, the G3 wins, hands down.

Sonnet card, definitely. Can you run a software DOS emulator on Nubus machines?

Yes, you can. But SoftWindows or VirtualPC will still be slower emulated on a G3 250 than it would be natively on the 486/100. (Not to mention that the PC side has 50% of the Mac side's RAM all on its own. Less RAM to dedicate; plus you get 100% perfect compatibility with old MS-DOS games, with an actual Sound Blaster onboard, etc.)

You could bump it up to 132 MB and run SoftWindows 2.0, but that doesn't fix the need for the Sidewinder.

I actually had decent results with emulated gaming on a 6100/60 with the same 250 MHz upgrade. After tinkering with SW2 a bit it was bearable, but I only tried mouse-based games. Maybe try a MouseStick?

It's not just the processor, though, it's emulating all the support chips as well. VPC is emulating the CPU, the RAM controller, the PCI bridge, the video chips, the sound, ... even with a modern VPC doing dynamic recompilation that's a big load to do.

Admittedly the PC is not a complex or highly timing dependent system like, say, the C64 or the SNES, but it's still a heavy haul for a G3/250 with a relatively slow system bus.

The other big differentiator is the memory. The DOS card in question has 32 MB of dedicated RAM; whereas running VPC it has to steal system RAM. Yes, you could in theory allocate more than 32 MB of the system's 72MB total; but the real physical RAM on a real physical CPU will run it better.

If you want, I'll find some old Windows 95-era benchmarks, and run them both on a 486/100 DOS card and in Virtual PC...

Which makes me wonder..... Can I run both Virtual PC and a DOS Compatibility Card at the same time?...

I don't see why you couldn't. VPC is just an app afterall...

That would be an interesting exercise, though. Can the two share files or filesystems? How about clipboards?

It has been a long time since I used a DOS card on a 6100. Did they run in windowed mode or were they full-screen only? A screenshot of Mac OS and two Windows in windows would be neat.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

It's been awhile, but I'm about 99.9% certain that all of the DOS cards were full-screen only.

Most of them required the hydra cable, to which you connected to your main video out and your monitor; so it would blank the Mac side while the Windows side was showing. (I think one of the all-in-ones allowed internal display switching via an internal cable.)

Filesystems would have to be shared via network, as VPC uses a different virtual hard drive than PC Setup. Clipboards should share, though, since both sync with the Mac clipboard.

The OrangeMicro cards, which are the best IMHO, did have a rather clever hack where every so often the Mac would sniff a frame from the PC card and update a window. Hardly realtime, but enough if you had a task you wanted to keep an eye on in the background. They also included a Windows app that did the same thing to the Mac.

I picked up a Reply DOS card the other day, the direct descendant of the original Apple DOS cards. Haven't tried it out yet, especially since the 7300 I use for this kind of hardware work is sort of wedded to my OrangePC 620 now (heat sink and all -- those K6-IIIs can sure get hot).

A little off topic, but I was wondering if that's the 7300 you got from me? Working okay I trust?

OrangeMicro made some interesting cards. I have the OrangePC 550 which works pretty well. Fortunately (!), I didn't have much use for it as I originally bought it for my wife to run MS Access. Shortly after that, she figured out a better way to meet her needs. That PCI card generated a TON of heat, too!

I was never really satisfied with the quality of the VGA pass-through. I always got noise on my screen when it was hooked up.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

DOS cards are very interesting pieces of hardware, but the value proposition was weak at best. The OrangePC 550 was priced at over $1000, and the 620 series was still several hundred dollars. A low-end PC could be bought for significantly less money. That's probably why these card makers died and why I don't generally recommend buying one except for the novelty.

Peace,
Drew
_________________
Power to the PowerPC!

I will say it certainly is convenient to have it all in one (very nice) case. I do have a 486 DOS ISA PC out for really cantankerous games, since OrangePC doesn't support DOS, but it's a big tower and it has its own unique "issues."

Well, if you dont mind 8mb of ram I have a pentium 90 notebook that I have had since new, and no idea what to do with it ...

No, it has to be ISA. Some games like Bio Menace absolutely go bonkers on PCI-bus motherboards, so Pentiums are out. The machine has an AMD 5x86-133 in it anyway, so while it's 486-class, it still gets around P75 performance (and has 3.5, 5.25 and CD-ROM drives, which is a little cramped in a lappy .

But the thought is appreciated

Speaking of which...

Did any of you ever try the 32-bit drivers (pcSetup 2.x) that were developed bu Fraser Valley Distributed Systems? I don't remember how/if they supported the 6100 cards.

Link here http://www.alksoft.com/personal/stuff.html

I have them and they should support the 6100 cards AFAIK, but I only have the Reply PC DOS PCI cards myself. Allegedly they are much the same, bus notwithstanding, of course.