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Macintosh Quadra 610 DOS Compatible (lowendmac.com)
8 points by wannacboatmovie 15 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



I used to use an OrangeMicro PCI card that was the same concept as this. I used it for cross-platform MacroMedia Director development. The was during the PowerPC era.


I love the Computer-Hosted-In-A-Computer products (for absolutely no good reason), I have both one of the education market Mac LCs with a IIe-on-a-chip in the PDS slot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe_Card ) and one of the slightly later PowerMac 6100/66 DOS with the first-party "Houdini II" 486 DOS card - The Houdini IIs are SoundBlaster 16 compatible (...ish) and the Is like the 610s bundled had kind of janky sound, so they're a little more "useful" (insomuch as a feeble 30 year old PC hosted in a 30 year old Mac is "useful").

The firmware is "uncanny valley" level mutant; it looks enough like a PC for DOS/3.1/95/98, and there are shim drivers to use the shared-in peripherals, but anything that does more direct hardware access will immediately notice it's not a PC and freak out ...that said, Despite claims that it's impossible, I did once get it to boot a minimal Linux system (IIRC some bullshit with a Tomsrtbt disc set and loadlin to chain load it from DOS, it was quite some time ago) - _barely_ functional, useless, but fun.

Amusingly, the vast majority of the DOS cards for Macs are lineally related, Phoenix Technologies designed the first gen cards for Apple, sold some aftermarket through AST Research, then Orange Micro bought the line from them and made most of the later aftermarket options.

...I'd love to complete the set and find a MacIvory/MicroExplorer or something, but I don't actually care for Lisp and the people who do have made the prices on working NuBus boards astronomical.




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