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I remember quite a few compatibility systems that came along over the years, and Orange Micro was the one name that stuck in my head. I never bought one, never used one, but their ads used to festoon the pages of mac magazines. Here's the first relevant result from Google, a posting to Applenews Belgium about the Cyrix-based 200mhz OrangePC 620 arriving. Furthing digginsg shows that the company's website appears defunct, going to a default hosting page.

Actually, there's a company called Orange Micro, which was originally an Apple reseller.

Its also a lot cheaper and easier to add a external USB hub than multiple firewire ports.

There are Firewire hubs, you know.

Orange Micro was in the business of making add-on cards for the Apple ][. I can't remember if they ever got mixed up with the motley fruit-monikered Taiwanese Apple ][ clones. (The Banana, the Pineapple, etc., many of which got blocked by customs when no one could show that the ROM's were "clean-room" developed. I guess the Laser II was clean, though.) I do seem to remember them hawking PC clones in the then-phonebook-sized Computer Shopper in the late 80's when everyone & his brother got in the clone business.

Nowadays they have a line of whacky peripherals, often prominently billing Mac support.

It's about time, seeing as how a PC inside of your Mac came out ages ago...

steve

IIRC, you just kinda plug them into your computer and it works... At least, kinda. I'm not sure, as I've only played with one for approximately 45 seconds, and then I was thrown out of the Apple store for wearing my WindowsXP shirt... But I digress.

Here's some software that appears to do what you want, I think.

Orangemicro.com

Full control over zoom and stuff like that. It looks pretty neat. I think I'll look up cheap firew-*ahem*-1394 cameras (now that I have my 1394 port of my own.) on one of those online-auction places.

A winner is you!

Since you bought up the problem of cost why not make a PCI bus card or a firewire box that has a PC in it? A nice 386 PC or maybe even a pentium.

Orange Micro used to make a few cards that did this. i still have a OrangePC 550 laying around. it's a K6-2/233 with it's own dedicated 256 MiB of memory and all the external ports you'd expect on an AT PC coming off a cable 'octopus' (save keyboard) - this thing even had it's own BIOS. this card only cost $200 or $300 less then getting a full blown PC, of the era (AKA $850 for a PCI card!)

the trick is that it hijacked the mac monitor, keyboard, and mouse while it was in use. it had a mac program running that hosted hard disk images (like virtualPC) for the PC to actually work. the host application also provided a few other VPC features like clipboard shearing.

sadly, virtualPC running on a 500 MHz G4 is just as fast, and the card isn't even supported on Mac OS 9 anyway.

it'd be interesting if a darwine type project could act as a new host for this card, custom OS and all....

(Apple used to make a similar card and setup, and even bundled it with a few older macs - Performa 640, PowerMac 6100/DOS, ect. they even advertised this on TV!)

Since you bought up the problem of cost why not make a PCI bus card or a firewire box that has a PC in it? A nice 386 PC or maybe even a pentium.

Orange Micro used to make a few cards that did this. i still have a OrangePC 550 laying around. it's a K6-2/233 with it's own dedicated 256 MiB of memory and all the external ports you'd expect on an AT PC coming off a cable 'octopus' (save keyboard) - this thing even had it's own BIOS. this card only cost $200 or $300 less then getting a full blown PC, of the era (AKA $850 for a PCI card!)

the trick is that it hijacked the mac monitor, keyboard, and mouse while it was in use. it had a mac program running that hosted hard disk images (like virtualPC) for the PC to actually work. the host application also provided a few other VPC features like clipboard shearing.

sadly, virtualPC running on a 500 MHz G4 is just as fast, and the card isn't even supported on Mac OS 9 anyway.

it'd be interesting if a darwine type project could act as a new host for this card, custom OS and all....

(Apple used to make a similar card and setup, and even bundled it with a few older macs - Performa 640, PowerMac 6100/DOS, ect. they even advertised this on TV!)

Since you bought up the problem of cost why not make a PCI bus card or a firewire box that has a PC in it? A nice 386 PC or maybe even a pentium.

Orange Micro used to make a few cards that did this. i still have a OrangePC 550 laying around. it's a K6-2/233 with it's own dedicated 256 MiB of memory and all the external ports you'd expect on an AT PC coming off a cable 'octopus' (save keyboard) - this thing even had it's own BIOS. this card only cost $200 or $300 less then getting a full blown PC, of the era (AKA $850 for a PCI card!)

the trick is that it hijacked the mac monitor, keyboard, and mouse while it was in use. it had a mac program running that hosted hard disk images (like virtualPC) for the PC to actually work. the host application also provided a few other VPC features like clipboard shearing.

sadly, virtualPC running on a 500 MHz G4 is just as fast, and the card isn't even supported on Mac OS 9 anyway.

it'd be interesting if a darwine type project could act as a new host for this card, custom OS and all....

(Apple used to make a similar card and setup, and even bundled it with a few older macs - Performa 640, PowerMac 6100/DOS, ect. they even advertised this on TV!)

I never addressed any part of your statement referring to speed. I only discussed resolution.

That said, naturally USB 1.1 even in Full Speed won't do 640x480 at 30fps. But USB 2.0 is getting pretty common, so you could try this camera for $99.

sounds like the Orange PC that you could use in a Mac (although it didn't put the mac on hold...)

Not only is FireWire 400 faster than USB 2, but FireWire 800 (IEEE1394b) is even faster than that. Built into new PowerMacs and PowerBooks (except the 12"PB), and available here here here and here (quick Google results).

A previous "iBot"

c'mon people. Google search before you name your product.

My iBot doesn't have a seat.

There are adapters from Orange Micro, TDK, MSI, and Brainboxes (to name a few) that make the Bluetooth headsets described in the article usable with your Mac.

Virtually all desktop computers, +/- maybe 5%, run Windows. Ergo, Windows must be best, right ?

Having something that everybody will use as an optional expansion card is dumb.

Once again, you've got a pretty weird idea of "everybody". Right now, "everybody" uses USB and *maybe* FW400 for the small number of devices that support only it. Perhaps what you really mean is "everybody in some tiny market segment".

The only thing that's fibre channel is the host interface. The drive-side interface can be anything from ATA to SSA to FC to ESCON.

Uh huh. Priced some suitable converters lately ? Not everyone can justify laying out ten grand for an XRAID when all they want is some nice fast local storage for their workstation.

Based on what? A silly Slashdot troll's idea of good and bad? No thanks. I think I'll stick to (1) the industry standard, and (2) what I know from firsthand experience works.

Which industry are you in where the "standard" way of attaching a bunch of disk to a workstation is Fibre Channel ?

In a laptop. Wow. That's... yup. I had to double check. That's by far the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Good for you. One of the stupidest things I've ever heard is your assertion that "everybody" is using the "industry standard" and attaching storage to their desktop workstations via FC.

Widescreen LCDs. Firewire 800. Builtin Wireless

I still haven't seen a link to that PC motherboard ("mainboard," pff) with built-in FireWire 800, either.

Why the obsession with "built-in" ?

Where's the Mac with "built-in" SCSI ?

Where's the Mac with "built-in" ATA RAID ?

Silly troll.

Ah, the irony. A hypocrite who thinks an "an articulated 17" digital LCD" is a core feature, higher DPI is bad and FC is the "industry standard" method of connecting disk space to workstations calling *me* a troll.

"More often than not"? Really? That hasn't been my experience. In fact, I haven't experienced a single problem due to a Windows update.

Win2K SP3 broke my FireWire webcam...when a filter graph that used it closed, the computer bluescreened. (I eventually found that you could copy ohci1394.sys from a SP2 system into %systemroot%\system32\drivers and use the camera under SP3 that way...but SP3 shouldn't have broken it to begin with.)

The experience of looking for this card got me to thinking:

Does anyone else remember back in the day, OrangeMicro used to sell a card, now discontinued :( for Macintoshes that put a fully working PC on a PCI card on your Mac. In fact, I think I still have that laying around here somewhere! You could switch between Windows95 and MacOS, both running in native hardware by hitting Command-Enter. It was very neat, like VirtualPC except in an actual Pentium instead of a virtual one.

Anyhow the inspiring part of the old OrangePC in this case is the multi-functional cable attached to the back. It was a truly monsterous wonder. One side was a huge hundreds-of-pins cable which plugged into the PCI card, and the other side split off into VGA video (which could pass-through the Mac signal, or interrupt it and output the PC signal), audio IO, 2 serial ports, a parallel port and a game port! It was truly an engineering masterpiece :)

So, why doesn't someone build a generic PCI device with such an awesome cable attached? It would give a whole new meaning to opencores.org. Software could be written that could drop in an arbitrary core and turn your card into any device that you desired that minute. Remember what Homer says: "Aww, I want it now!". With such a device, you could have it, or build it yourself right from your desktop if you were so inclined ;) For example, if the bass is rattling on my friends new album and we want to try cutting off frequencies below 10hz:

• install open extensible DSP core
• install custom logic: if (f < 10) v = 0
• Play/record through card

You could even do what OrangePC did and drop a whole processor/OS combination (or develop one) on the board and seamlessly switch between it and the host OS. If the card had multiple FPGAs, it could even drive multiple custom devices simultaneously.

Bye bye PCI hardware vendors (except ones to make the general purpose boards). Next, let's build an AGP8x version (with a stable on-board backup VGA core, just in case ;) and set our sights on NVidia and ATI! Now, any volunteers to build an open-source OpenGL accelerated VGA core? All it is is a couple of multipliers, right? ;)

The problem may be that no PCI/AGP vendor in their right minds would ever build such a thing, because it would replace all their products. Still, it's fun to dream about such a useful piece of hardware.

The experience of looking for this card got me to thinking:

Does anyone else remember back in the day, OrangeMicro used to sell a card, now discontinued :( for Macintoshes that put a fully working PC on a PCI card on your Mac. In fact, I think I still have that laying around here somewhere! You could switch between Windows95 and MacOS, both running in native hardware by hitting Command-Enter. It was very neat, like VirtualPC except in an actual Pentium instead of a virtual one.

Anyhow the inspiring part of the old OrangePC in this case is the multi-functional cable attached to the back. It was a truly monsterous wonder. One side was a huge hundreds-of-pins cable which plugged into the PCI card, and the other side split off into VGA video (which could pass-through the Mac signal, or interrupt it and output the PC signal), audio IO, 2 serial ports, a parallel port and a game port! It was truly an engineering masterpiece :)

So, why doesn't someone build a generic PCI device with such an awesome cable attached? It would give a whole new meaning to opencores.org. Software could be written that could drop in an arbitrary core and turn your card into any device that you desired that minute. Remember what Homer says: "Aww, I want it now!". With such a device, you could have it, or build it yourself right from your desktop if you were so inclined ;) For example, if the bass is rattling on my friends new album and we want to try cutting off frequencies below 10hz:

• install open extensible DSP core
• install custom logic: if (f < 10) v = 0
• Play/record through card

You could even do what OrangePC did and drop a whole processor/OS combination (or develop one) on the board and seamlessly switch between it and the host OS. If the card had multiple FPGAs, it could even drive multiple custom devices simultaneously.

Bye bye PCI hardware vendors (except ones to make the general purpose boards). Next, let's build an AGP8x version (with a stable on-board backup VGA core, just in case ;) and set our sights on NVidia and ATI! Now, any volunteers to build an open-source OpenGL accelerated VGA core? All it is is a couple of multipliers, right? ;)

The problem may be that no PCI/AGP vendor in their right minds would ever build such a thing, because it would replace all their products. Still, it's fun to dream about such a useful piece of hardware.

I don't know if they still make them, but for the longest time you could buy such a card. Orange Micro used to make such a line of card, known as OrangePC. They wern't terribly popular. I know for a while you could buy PowerMacs with PC cards preinstalled, usually leading to a 'PC' after the model number, such as the 7300/180 PC that has a 166Mhz Pentium in addition to it's 180Mhz PowerPC chip.

I have no idea if anyone makes products like this for modern Macs.

The company was Orange Micro , and they've long since gotten out of the business.

Their cards were always priced similarly to a complete PC system at the same Mhz; what you were paying for was a) the convenience of running two systems out of one box, and b) the interoperability of the two environments. Their competition was Insignia's SoftWindows emulator, which was as zippy as a tortoise in a vat of cold molasaass, so Orange Micro offered a significantly better solution.

I think what killed their business model was that Macs got fast enough to run PC emulation software at acceptable speeds (about the time the G3's first came out). No, you still couldn't do 3D modeling with it, but when you double-clicked on the My Computer icon on the desktop, the window would open and render in seconds rather than minutes. That also meant that Office-type applications now ran at acceptible speeds, despite the fundamental x86/PPC incompatibility of having to convert big endian/small endian numbers for every byte that passed through the CPU. Orange Micro just couldn't compete because their PC cards started at just over $1000, whereas VirtualPC cost (back then) about $250.

I was looking at webcams, but they are all USB, meaning they can't be hooked up through a cable longer than 5 feet. Firewire would allow 35 feet, but that would mean FINDING a firewire webcam.

Here ya go.

Check out OrangeMicro's iBot for a firewire cam, they're the only ones I've found that use a firewire interface.

It's actually at the root of the Start Menu and has been added to the left-hand nav of the Add/Remove Programs dialogue.

Win2K SP3 adds a similar feature...but I'd recommend against installing it. In addition to the issues previously noted WRT SP3, I've found it's great at destabilizing Win2K. Two of my machines started bluescreening whenever a DirectShow filter graph involving their webcams (Orange Micro iBots) was closed, and I just spent the past weekend in Phoenix reloading everything on my father's computer because SP3 hosed his MSN setup and caused printing to run at a glacial pace. Now that all of the affected machines have been put back to SP2, all is well with the world again.

As far as the keyboard and mouse...well, let's not push it!

Ironically enough, this mentality locks the end user out of using traditionally Mac-only type of hardware (consumer SCSI devices).

And if it is important to the user to use their SCSI device, they can buy this OrangeMicro Firewire to SCSI converter which has drivers built into Mac OS X (completely plug and play), and works with most scanners, CD Burners, Zip drives, etc...

And every possible peripheral device that I want to use with my iBook (running OS X 10.1.2), I have been able to. My scanner and printer are USB, as is my Rio 500... my SCSI zip drive and CD burner connect through the orange converter (the CD burner is even supported in iTunes that way!). When I buy a digital camera, there are USB SmartMedia and CompactFlash readers... I am using my Airport card to connect to an SMC wireless access point...

USB 2.0 has no interest for me, because all of it's intended benefits and devices are already available to me through a combination of existing USB and FireWire devices

The only possible thing I might want to add is a faster wireless connection... and that card is easily replacable.

And if we get farther in the future than that, then I will want to buy a new laptop anyway, for the increased processor spead and storage.

So what was your point again?

Whoops, wrong URL. http://www.orangemicro.com/opc660.html is what I meant to paste.

Also, you can get a SCSI to FireWire adapter from Orange Micro.

The Orange Converter is a unique device for Mac and PC users allowing SCSI peripherals to connect to FireWire 1394 ports. The Orange Converter easily attaches to any Macintosh FireWire port or any Windows based PC that has FireWire ports, and converts all SCSI data from your SCSI peripheral, both input and output. iMac owners with FireWire ports can now have access to SCSI peripherals. Macintosh G3 and G4 owners who are "slot challenged" can use the Orange Converter to save a valuable PCI slot by removing any existing SCSI PCI host adapter card.

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Apple's firewire page
...and product list

Orange Micro PC firewire products
Ratoc systems firewire products
VST firewire pcmcia card