Apple's 1997 PC Compatibility Card: Install A Whole Windows PC In Your Mac!
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
- In this video, I showcase the last iteration of Apple's PC compatibility cards for the Mac. This one, released in 1997, is a single PCI card that contains a 166MHz Pentium and 16MB of RAM, effectively allowing you to run Windows 3.1 or 95 on your Mac. I unbox the card, install it into the Mac, and go through the setup process, all while my hard drive self-destructs in the background.
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Apple contracted Phoenix Technologies circa 1987 to produce 286 and 8086 cards for the Mac II and Mac SE, respectively. Just before the release of the machines, they got cold feet and sold the Mac286 and Mac86 products to AST, who later sold them to Orange Micro. I was one of 4-5 developers of the products. We looked at virtualizing the CPU too, but the problem was memory, not so much processor speed, as instruction decoding required enormous (for the time) data trees.
Awesome story! I’m surprised by that - I’ve tried virtual machines on computers that are much more powerful than this one and they felt sluggish.
did you write the specs for the interface????? so drivers for a proper OS aka Linux be written for these cards
As I recall, the Macintosh app was monolitic, so there wasn't an "interface" per-se. It contained a Phoenix BIOS that was squirted onto the cards and a bunch of emulations of the various chips not resident on the board (I remember writing these for the 8254, 8259, and 16550 and others.) It also had a network redirector so Mac files could be seen on the PC side. There were some hardware tricks that would trap I/O cycles (in/out ops) so we could fake the results up in software and return them. And, in the case of the SE, some interrupt logic to "knife switch" back and forth between the Mac and the 8086/8.
why does one need enormous trees
What is a data tree?
I would recommend to backup those floppies/driver's/Cd's to the internet archive in case anyone out there needs them. The way it works seamlessly with your Mac is truly amazing. Sad that Quake didn't install though.
Thanks for sharing this gem with us. 😊
it's a pc inside a mac wow😱
he forgets about windows 98 which it could also run🤣
Clothings and airplanes still use floppy disk. Almost clothing machines came from Japan and its from 50-60 years ago so only floppy disk can be installed. Airplanes hardware also came from that era and update firmware require floppy disk
He said they had already been uploaded by others.
What really sucks is when you have the guest OS (win95) running, swap back to Mac and since it doesn’t have protected memory, an app could crash on the Mac side and take windows down as well. Save, save, save, etc. The good old days.
Could you not reset the Mac side of it without resetting the PC side? Otherwise, they both had their own separate dedicated memory, but still maybe exposed in some way over the PCI bus and a potentially bad software problem could maybe overwrite the PC memory that way (although that would be a neat debugging/reverse engineering capability if it had that kind of access, but I doubt it.).
@@Aeduoiirc you can mess with the pc memory from the mac side or freeze the pc.. Technically
The Mac's startup process probably zeroes-out the address space, which I assume would include the PC's address space...
Even if it didn't, I bet Windows 95 wouldn't take too kindly to suddenly losing a bunch of "peripherals" that the Mac is providing over PCI.
I KNEW that this wasn’t a myth that I thought I imagined! I even remember seeing an advertisement for this on TV, too! Peace.
Acorn Computers RISC PC had space for 3 cards in them. They came with the native RISCOS but they also sold a 486 card to run it as a windows PC.
It effectively slowed the computer down muddied up the display and limited the number of programs you could run at once...
I've still got mine.
I didn't know that Apple did this too!
Thank you, for this fun "Blast from the Past". In 1996, there was a co-worker of mine who, had an earlier version of this PC card because his computer was a 6100 desktop. This video is an excellent example of why, I decided not to buy a Windows 95 computer but selected as my first Apple computer an All-in-One 5400. In the late 1990's, Apple computers, just worked right out of the box while, windows systems worked well only after ... they were set-up properly. The oldest computer in my collection is an All-in-One 5500 (which, looks just like a 5400 system) and it has an internal Apple video card, internal Apple TV/FM card along with its matching black remote control (smile...smile).
he forgot it can also run windows 98 as well
@@SaraMorgan-ym6ue Yes, you are correct it also supports windows 95. Back in the day, I really wanted one of these units because felt they provided the home computer user with the best of both worlds (PC and Mac). In addition, you knew any software package you picked-up would run on your system (smile...smile).
@@transitengineer yeah specially since then technically you had two computers in one system quite literally since the windows pc was a second computer in the same computer it used the pentium cpu instead of the mac's cpu which works differently
3:24 Hi there, I am an old PC builder from the times of this Pentium processor. I remember that back then all Pentiums had fans on the heatsink, but yours doesn't. Apple meant it to be this way but I still believe that your card and especially the CPU heatsink have too little breathing space-Looks like it's just about 1cm or so between heatsink and side wall. That's most likely not enough air convection going on in the long shot. Add to that how jam-packed the card is with a GPU, Chipset, etc.
Just a thought from an old tinkerer. ^.^
I ended up moving it to the rightmost slot later.
@mipmipmipmipmipPentium without active cooling was a big no-no.
This is crazy! Did I miss what this used to cost? This is such a niche product that I’m surprised Apple even developed it. I wonder how many units they shipped.
I had a Power Mac like that at one time, a 7200 with a PC compatibility card in it. I think it was a Pentium 100 on board. It was good enough for playing Daggerfall, anyway, and that's what I did on it.
In the 80s until the 90s there were similar cards for emulating PCs and Mac on the Amiga computer.
I had one of these back in the day. I installed a faster cpu, maxed out the ram and played Ultimate Online on it. It got super hot in my PowerMax so I cut part of the case away to mount an extra fan and heatsink. I eventually just built a pc to play and would sometimes let my gf play as well. I worked at a computer shop that had a t1 so I ran cat5 up to my apartment. At night I had the best ping in the game lol. Those were the good old days
this is fucking sick. i’ve been into this old mac stuff for years and ive never heard of this before
What’s also funny is that they possibly could of modified the design of that card to have it’s own internal power regulator and IO connections on the sides instead of a PCI connection and it could then be used as the motherboard in a Windows Pentium laptop! :)
Matthew, Don't feel too bad. We tried this card (and an all software solution) to solve PC/Mac comparability issues in the early 1990s at my long time Fortune 50. The stuff never worked correctly. Overall, the 1990s Apple products were pretty crappy. Glad Jobs came back to pull them out of the trash heap.
IBM did a similar thing with 370 mainframes. They created a card to plug into a windows expansion slot with a 370 mainframe processor and software to emulate the i/o channels.
They shrunk the mainframe to 1 CPU?
@danwat1234 this was in the 80s, when 370 mainframes were often single cpu. This was designed for developers to test function, not speed.
Imagine being an engineer on that team. 😂
Person: "Oh, you work at Apple? That's cool! What do you do?"
Engineer: "I design PC motherboards"
Man I remember mine! I had it in a 7300. Installing drivers on the windows side was a torturous process. Used a S3 chipset that was a PITA to find drivers for.
this is so much better than all those lousy virtualization methods of today. i want this with today’s hardware.
Nothing stopping you putting a micro pc inside a desktop with a KVM lol
I used to work for Reply corporation as a support engineer for the Dos on Mac card. It was such a nice feature to be able to run OSx and Windows in parallel
That thing reminds me of my old 386.
It's a 386 on an ISA card. As in, the CPU and RAM are on a card, along with some of the IO like mouse port and VGA. Other things like IDE and Floppy interfaces were on the "Motherboard" which was actually pretty tiny, and had basically nothing else on it, just 2 ISA slots and a little IO (I don't remember if things like the Parallel and Serial ports were on the card or motherboard, I think Mouse port was on the card, and Keyboard port on the Motherboard). so you could have 1 ISA slot for a network card or sound card or something.
I have one of these setups but I run it on System 7.5. Cost a small fortune to buy all the parts from the USA to be sent down to Australia, but works really well! Makes me wish we bought a Mac back in the late 90s and used one of these to have Windows so we had the best of both.
I wish I knew about this in 1997. I did graphic design on a Mac, while the rest of the company was on Windows. IT wouldn't service the Macs or back up our system on the main servers. With a PC card we could avoided a data loss due to backup failure.
A good Mac OS version for that model would be 7.6.1, and that would likely be much more compatible with the PC card software as well.
My high school had the computer lab filled with these. You would just press Command+Shift+Enter (or something like that) and that was how you switched between Mac and Win.
Loved our dual book PC from like 1994 or something, many good times playing both PC and Mac games.
DOS is needed first because Win95 literally ran on top of DOS. WindowsXP was Microsoft's first modern consumer operating system. I bet it runs on that card.
I still have my 486/66 card for my PM6100/AV - it had an even messier set of external cables as I have the AV to DB15 video converter cable in the mix as well!
I started college in 1995, and I remember going to the computer lab, where they had Macs running DOS/Win3.1. I'm guessing it was using hardware just like this. I remember those computers running DOS/Win abysmally slow, but having been primarily a DOS/Windows guy at that point, that was what I had to live with. Boy this video takes me back...
I have a PowerMac 7600@200 that came from an e-waste reseller shop that came with this card installed (along with the internal cables), but not the video daisy-chain cable thing (nor could I find it anywhere else in their store). The rig works fine with BlueSCSI installed (though AFAIK the hard drives are dead, the floppy drive is toast, and the CD drive, while operational, screams like a banshee any time I open/close the tray). I'm primarily an IBM-compatible collector, and as such most of my knowledge resides in that ecosystem (I was raised in a power user, staunchly-PC-only household in the 90's), so it's been a learning curve figuring out how to use an old Mac. But, since I already have a Super Socket 7, I have little need for this board and want to sell it; I just can't test it because I don't know if I can safely DIY a video output cable to VGA/whatever the DB15 thing is that Macs use: all I see online are pinouts, but I need to know they didn't add any resistors/logic/anything inside the official cable
FYI: Acorn's 6502 BBC micro range, from 1981, included a TUBE interface, to permit a second processor to be hooked up, be it another 6502, Z80, 32016, 6809, 68008, 8088, 80186, ARM, ... . They sold a 10MHz 80186 + 512KB RAM bundle, that included a copy of Digital Research's DOSplus and CP/M, in the mid 1980s (There are videos on this platform on that offering), while Torch Computers sold an 8088 + 256KB RAM, with MS DOS 2.11, from 1984. There's even a current RaspberryPi (GPIO) hat, the Pi Tube Direct, that will allow a PI to emulate all the above processors, and offer much faster RAM to a 40+ year old BBC micro.
Ahh yes the good old days...
Cool tip: ditch 95 and go with 98/ME, all that stuff should work properly and faster right off the bat.
I had one of these, and work had a few. All of them were PowerPC 6100/66s. It was very good
Thanks man. I had one of those as a kid around 99-2000
I have a few of the apple branded PC compatibility cards, (one of the full length, and one smaller length card to be able to fit in my Beige G3 AIO (molar mac G3)), and an OrangePC 660.
I remember Softwindows too, an emulated 3.x that ran just fine on circa system 7 Macs. Can't speak for its speed but it just werked.
One of my teachers had one of these in middle school and I remember his constantly freezing as well lol. Your better off just getting a real pc. Still really neat and fun to play with just for what it is.
Also I do not at all miss having to install every single driver over and over if you like changing and playing with hardware. Auto update is A+ okay in my book.
used that card in this PowerPC, Pentium Chip, sold by apple themselves. The cable i still have.
It did run games and Autodesk autocat.
That's definitely one way of ensuring compatibility.
This is like Siamese Twins doing the "Hello, I'm a Mac, And I'm a PC" ad campaign.
Man, I have a Macintosh 7600, and I would LOVE to get one of these cards for it.
This is amazing. Didn't know this was a thing.
I am surprised this card contains a real ATI video chip.
There were similar cards for the Amiga (I think up to 486) that used the Amiga graphics chip to emulate PC video. This allowed the PC to run in a window on the Amiga GUI.
While this came with a performance penalty on the Amiga I think a power Mac would have been much more capable at doing this.
The only performance penalty was on Zorro II if you had an 8 Mb Memory card populated as well as that would flood the bus. You needed to cut down to 4 Mb max. This problem does not exist for Zorro III.
@@ForOdinAndAsgardGod bless Zorro III
(5:54) The readme file indicated that the Mac OS 7.5.3 installer was included for users on earlier releases to upgrade to as the PC Compatibility Card software for the Mac side had a minimum version requirement of 7.5.3.
(4:56) It could be possible that the copy of Windows 95 you have was originally included with a PC built by a system integrator.
Nubus seems like one of the cards for battle tech
Imagine if expansion cards like this were still a thing.
Raspberry Pis on PCIe slots are the only thing since, pretty much
@@iplyrunescape305 You can put a Raspberry Pi on a PCI slot?
@@indigomizumi yup
Intel Larrabee blue graphics card kinda
As I am looking at the DOS install progress bar, My brain automatically inserted the 3.5" diskette drive noises that go along with it! 🤣
Those powermacs must’ve came with the Sony monitor setup. Yours is near exactly what my mother had bought back in 1996.
I'd like to go back to the 90s and just stay there.
i wish they still made stuff like this.
Imagine if they did this but in reverse. Run an Apple addin card and use it to run Mac OS natively on a PC.
im blown away its working so well through a pci bus
Damn it’s got a HDD, I hope you get a SSD or BlueSCSI soon before the drive dies
I had one of these back in the day - and it was always supper buggy. Freezing up, not shutting down was all normal for this
I remember DOS 6.22 was the actual OS that Windows 95 sat on. Windows 95 provided the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that made it easier to use. Single Board Computers were nothing new when Apple made this full length SBC for customers who needed to use both types of Personal Computers (PCs / micro computers). Welcome to the frustration of using Windows 95/98/98 SE. With the SBC having its own video port it would have been better to connect a second dedicated monitor to it. Does it have PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors? If so then you could have had another set of IBM style keyboard and 2-3 button mouse with a scroll wheel. The last thing to attempt would be the connection of an external SCSI hard drive. From it you could daisy chain a number of other SCSI peripherals so that you'd have two fully separately functioning computers. With the SBC residing inside the Apple/IBM hybrid PowerPC where it draws power from.
It's also why filenames would so often end in the likes of ~1; the underlying file system was still DOS's 8 characters + 3 character extension FAT, so any "long form" filename was a lookup table on top of that. It wasn't until XP that the version of Windows marketed to home users switched to the NT base and the NTFS file system (yes I KNOW that's redundant to say it that way).
Quake?! Man, I only wanna know if it can run Doom.
I wish this was still a thing except i want a card that will let me virtualise a mac (or amiga) on my pc... Would quite like an arm one too for virtual Archimedes.
Imagine if Apple made something like this today for their Mac Pro computers?
I love cards like these. Everything from the Apple IIe card for the Macintosh, to the Apple II cards for the PC, to the Bridgeboards for the big box Amigas, and the Power PC (Not PowerPC!) board for the trapdoor of the Amiga 500, and now to this. Makes me wonder if there's also a PowerPC Mac board for IBM compatibles. Anyway, I'd love to get a collection of these cards and install them in various machines but unfortunately a lot of these are practically unobtainium these days.
Funny to think apple had such confidence in their own products that they needed to create a card to turn your expensive shiny mac in to a PC. ;) lol
Patience is a virtue
If i recall power off didn’t work. Later there was a way to pass via poweroff
It was had to be with physical poweroff
Your pc is ready to be powered off
Always wanted one of these. Was stuck with Virtual PC on a G3 333 (may have been a 266 actually)...did not run well. And DirectX support? L. O. L.
Hazy cd might be disk rot unfortunately, however there should be ISOs available for Quake. I mean, you have the original game, so it's not like you're pirating it.
The thrilling sequel to PC Transporter.
Somewhere I have an entire PC on a card from Seiko, as in a PCMCIA card. I've no idea how to power the thing up.
I love your door stopper thingy, also
OrangeMicro continued to make them past 1997, theirs were generally cheaper and more powerful.
i have a few pmx systems that are a 286 on an isa card that just plugged into a board of isa slots for power and to add other cards
They had a card like this for the Amiga a bit further back as well.
u can spam left and right arrow keys to speed up boot
Holy shit those hybrid machines were unreliable pieces of crap. I used to maintain a lab that was half mac PC hybrids. I forget what model, but I believe they came that way from the factory.
Only 25$?!? Wow the inflation is real. Curious, could you run multiple cards in one mac?
Apple before: We love our users and want the best for them! We released a PCI card that users can put on their Macs to run software made for our competitor.
Apple now: we no want app from outsid da app stor
I always wondered if one of these would work in a PC
It's probably just missing drivers and programs to run it.
I don’t think you needed to install DOS first. You just needed the correct CD-ROM driver for your Windows 95 boot disk. The PC compatibility card might emulate an IDE interface…
As I recall DOS was a pre-requisite for Windows 95.
@@bcbock Only if you bought the cheaper upgrade edition. No DOS or Win3 needed for retail Win95.
A full retail Windows 95 box had a boot floppy with a minimal MS-DOS 7 (which is the boot level kernel of Windows 95 prior to VMM32.VXD protected mode kernel) which had a generic IDE CD-ROM driver and some DOS utilities to format the hard drive and start Windows 95 installation program.
@@vascomanteigas9433You could skip the floppy part if the CD boot could properly recognize the hardware.
@@jimbotron70 I don't think the first few versions of Win95 were bootable CDs. Maybe OSR2 and newer.
ahhh the ole Sony 15sf. Crazy story about the naming of these models and Sony getting sued.
Xerox had (their version of) these in their internal desktop PCs in 1989.
Wow that Windows 95 was being so Windows 95 right from the start.
I'm curious if this card can be used as a stand alone PC like a Doom machine to run Doom. You turn it on and it boots up and then doom starts up and you play.
You’d need to power it somehow, and I imagine it’d be a project and a half to trace the PCI bus, wire it up, and make it standalone. Would be cool!
@@BertRedd if it has an external monitor output and then you just find the 5v gnd and 12 volt rails. Not sure how you would manually turn it on. Was thinking of something like this as a dedicated doom gaming machine.
12:54 sounds like that's vibrating a lot
For all that trouble it would have been easier to just buy a PC in 1997 🤦
Can you upload part two of this video running ms dos games on this card?
I bet the card is the fucking best x86 pc even back then compared
How does the Apple PC Compatibility Card work to run Windows software on a Mac?
hi vodoo vga compatible any setting? 4 days ago found and order ebay this card cyrix 6x86 version and put my 4400/200 a fix compatible with combinate this voodoo 2 sli or voodoo 3 solved?
If you could run Windows NT it would make the Macintosh less garbage. Curious if it would be possible.
Then again, you could just get a PC... 😁
I mean, it’s a full x86 system. NT 4 should run on it.
I have this card and unfortunately you can't run Windows NT. It only allows Dos 6.22, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 or Windows 95.
@@BertRedd Unfortunately, the driver support isn't there.
sun had the same thing for their workstations
Curious how cables would be routed with 3dfx voodoo2 card
so this is basically bootcamp way back when in the day?
since when do you need DOS installed before Win95?
is it only because you use this card?
That Pentium has to get Hot AF with no fan.
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No, actually. You could not run Windows in a virtual machine, on a PPC CPU. A VM is unable to emulate a different CPU architecture… you need an emulator for that.
Me “…don’t you need a boot disk for 95?” Oh wow I was right hahaha xD
… I had an apple II gs with a PC Card in college
Awesome video
Ahh Yes ATI... i loved to hate them... but i use AMD GPU's now which are basically just the big brothers of ATI cards
It looks like that ps3 is backward compatible with ps2 games because ps3 has got a ps2 chip inside!
It's more cool if this mac is able to integrate pc apps into mac desktop!
That would require a _lot_ of work.
And probably make Mac OS way more unstable.
No way to play 3d games on win95?
I have 3dfx voodoo 2 game wizard for mac with nag g3 but I don't think there will be workaround to get it working with this card. What's your opinion ?
Someone bought that card on closeout or at a thrift shop for US$15.00!!!
Crazy how much more expensive everything retro has gotten, people want $150 for just the cable on eBay now.
@@matthewscomputerswhat was the original MSRP?
as interesting as this is, i feel you're doing yourself a disservice by not ensuring that you have all that you need to upload the video (aka the audio cables). it would be a different story if it just didn't work for whatever reason but a lot of people (particularly back then) would have very much cared about that sort of thing. fans of particular soundcard brands were just as if not even more at war with eachother than GPU or PC maker brands.