Orange Micro's OrangePC

An Orange PC for Every User Need

From the May 1997 issue of MacWorld magazine

The Company

I wrote a short bio for this company when I wrote about their Grappler last December. Today, let’s take a look at another interesting product.

The Product

Emulation has long been a part of the personal computer world. In the 1990s, if you owned a Mac and need to run DOS or Windows applications, you had two options: use software emulation or install a compatibility card that basically contained an entire PC. Orange sold the latter under the name OrangePC. The technology was originally created and designed by AST Research. Orange Micro purchased the technology from them.

According to an OrangePC user manual from 1999, “The Orange Micro card is a Wintel compatible computer in your Macintosh. The Orange Micro card supports Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT based applications that run on a Wintel compatible computer with the following system configuration:

• Pentium or 6x86 Processors up to 400 MHz MMX

• On-board video memory up to 4 MB on some models

• Hard disk up to 2GB, as defined in the setup according to available Mac hard disk space

• PS/2 enhanced keyboard

• PS/2 compatible three-button mouse

• Super VGA support which displays up to 16 million colors

• 1.44MB 3.5" internal floppy disk drive

• Stereo sound emulated through Macintosh sound hardware

• 512K level 2 cache on Model 660

• CD-ROM drive

• SCSI adapter via ASPI Manager

• Millennium support for the year 2000”

The early version had some quality issues. Steve Michel reviewed a 486 OrangePC for MacWEEK in 1993. He wrote:

“In an ideal cross-platform world, a computer would run MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and Apple’s System 7 all in one box and all at full speed. It would also have full and seamless communications between the different systems so that exchanging data would be as easy as cut and paste or drag and drop.

There are a number of solutions for creating seamless Macintosh-to-PC integration, not least of all the various flavors of Insignia Solutions Inc.’s SoftPC, Mac software that emulates an IBM PC or compatible. A more ambitious, more costly

and potentially more powerful solution comes from Orange Micro Inc. in the form of its recently shipped OrangePC NuBus board, the successor to its Orange 386. This is a nearly complete PC with its own processor, video support, expansion

slot, and parallel and serial ports, designed to run inside an existing NuBus-equipped Mac.

…

The boards support protected mode and extended memory (which is required by Windows 3.1), unlike SoftPC, which supports these features only in its Quadra version. Orange’s boards ship with DOS but not with Windows.

From June 14, 1993 issue of MacWEEK

With the exception of the hard disk, the performance is nearly independent of the Mac itself. The OrangePC accesses the hard disk through the Mac’s filing system, which slows it down somewhat during disk-intensive operations. On the positive side, this lets you switch between the Mac and PC seamlessly. You can have one processing in the background while you work in the other’s window in the foreground.

…

Performance of the OrangePC board is good, although not breathtaking by PC-compatible standards. In Ziff-Davis Labs’ WinBench benchmarking tests, the OrangePC’s screen speed was more than 1.6 million pixels per second. Symantec Corp.’s Norton Utilities 6.0 gave the CPU a rating of 39.3, compared with the original IBM PC (which rated a 1.0). Clearly, this kind of performance is very good, and for some memory-based tests (Microsoft Excel recalculations, for example), it provided better performance than the same tests running in native mode on our Mac IIx with a DayStar Digital 50-MHz ’030 accelerator.

…

At $1,799, OrangePC isn’t cheap. Stand-alone PCs equipped with a monitor, hard disk, keyboard and more interface slots are in the same price range. Since communications between the board and your Mac are extremely limited with OrangePC, a stand-alone PC with a simple null-modem cable and translation software is a better buy if you need it now. However, if PC compatibility inside your Macintosh is a priority, and you can put up with the missing software pieces until upgrades are released, the OrangePC should offer a good solution.”

The same month, John Rizzo wrote an article for MacUser entitled “The Mac Does Windows”. Rizzo again compares SoftPC’s software emulation and OrangePC’s hardware emulation. From the article:

“The OrangePC board is packed with PC hardware, so it uses few of the Mac’s hardware resources. First, there’s a none-too-shabby CPU (a 25-megahertz 80486SLC-25 in the top model and an 80386sx-25 in the other two models), with an Intel 80387sx-25 math coprocessor as an option. Another plus: The board's VGA circuitry can pass graphics through the Mac to a standard Mac monitor, so you don't have to plug the monitor in to the card (Orange Micro expects to offer Super VGA sometime this year).

The OrangePC also has its own RAM, sitting in four SIMM slots, and the two higher-end models include a wealth of connectivity items: serial and parallel ports for connecting to printers or other PC peripherals and an AT expansion slot that accommodates standard half-sized boards (8- and 16-bit). The expansion slot lets you put an OrangePC-equipped Mac onto any PC network.

I tested both products with off-the-shelf Windows applications (such as Excel and Ami Pro) to see how much faster a 486-equipped OrangePC is than SoftPC with Windows. I ran SoftPC on a Quadra 950 and the OrangePC in a Mac IIci, because the board runs at the same speed regardless of which Mac model contains it. The OrangePC is a true multiprocessing product and doesn’t use the Mac’s CPU. PC programs on your Mac run just as fast in the background as they do in the foreground. In fact, you can install multiple OrangePC cards in a Mac, each running independently.

The speed of SoftPC with Windows, on the other hand, is directly proportional to the speed of the computer it’s running on — as you’ll understand if you see Insignia’s versions of SoftPC for high-speed RISC workstations in action. The processing required for SoftPC with Windows is considerable; the Mac has to process a Windows application on top of the Windows interface on top of DOS on top of the CPU-emulation software on top of the Mac operating system.

As a result, SoftPC with Windows is not for power users. SoftPC took 40 seconds to launch Windows, whereas the OrangePC took 14 seconds. With Windows applications, the OrangePC was four to six times as fast as SoftPC. For instance, the OrangePC took about 5 seconds to recalculate a 2,000-cell Excel for Windows spreadsheet. This is a faster recalculation time than you’d get on many Mac models running the same spreadsheet with the Mac version of Excel. In contrast, SoftPC with Windows took 24 seconds to do the recalculation.

The OrangePC would have scored even better on the Excel tests if I’d added a math coprocessor to the board, and SoftPC with Windows would have fared worse on a slower Mac. Still, SoftPC is not impossibly slow. There’s a delay when you pull down menus and change windows, but it is not long enough to make you want to go get a cup of coffee.

…

“But wait a minute,” you may say, “why should anyone buy a PC board for their Mac when they could buy a real PC for the same price or less?” For one thing, the OrangePC is a real PC, and having it in your Mac is a more convenient way to manage your Mac and PC files and data. And compared with RocketShare, Radius' 68040-based Mac-on-a-board, Orange Micro’s PC-on-a-board is reasonably priced. Perhaps more important, the last thing most people need is two computers sitting on one desk. It's more work for your company to support two monitors, two boxes, two keyboards, and two mice. And if the company you work for is anything like the one I work for. it’s much easier to justify an add-in board for a computer than to justify a second computer for your desk. “

The following year, Galen Gruman wrote an article for MacWorld the had the familiar title of “The Mac Does Windows”. (I thought Mac users were creative.) The article looks at solutions from OrangePC, SoftWindows (which we covered last December), and Timbuktu. Apparently, the OrangePC improved, but still had some issues. From the article:

“The OrangePC software lets you establish a shared drive or folder for exchanging data between Mac and Windows programs. OrangePC can also read SoftWindows virtual drives, but it can’t start up from them. It also has trouble copying large groups of files from SoftWindows drives, reporting disk errors intermittently.

The OrangePC setup supports the use of external SCSI PC drives as shared volumes (you’ll need Apple’s Macintosh PC Exchange 2.0 software to mount them on the Mac desktop). In our initial tests, however, we couldn’t use either Mac or PC SCSI drives as a shared volume. As it turned out, OrangePC doesn’t automatically install the utility necessary for sharing in your start-up PC drive. Once installed, drive sharing worked fine with both drives. But you’ll experience a slow down in drive-access speed if you share PC drives as Mac volumes, because of how the data moves between the Mac and the OrangePC board. If you need fast access to an external PC drive, use a PCMCIA-based hard drive or a SCSI drive connected to the OrangePC card via a PCMCIA SCSI adapter. Both the Model 250 and 290 support PCMCIA.

From the October 1994 issue of MacWorld

The OrangePC software provides limited copying and pasting of unformatted text between Mac and DOS programs and from Mac to Windows applications. It copies graphics only from Windows programs to Mac programs, and then only as bitmaps. Text copied from a Windows program is converted to a bitmap graphic when pasted into a Mac program. Because of these limitations, don’t try to copy information via the Clipboard. Instead, save the file in a common file format — such as RTF for formatted text, TIFF for bitmaps, or EPS for drawings — and transfer it via network, floppy, or shared volume.

Through optional PCMCIA network cards, you can connect a Model 250 or 290 OrangePC card to a PC Ethernet or Token Ring network. Another option for any of the OrangePC cards is to use a parallel-to-Ethernet adapter card. Either way, you’ll need the appropriate PC networking software, too.

…

For most Macintosh users who also need regular access to PC software, though. Orange Micro’s cards are the best bet. They come in a range of configurations and prices, so you can buy the amount of power you need. All models are expandable, so you can add peripherals. And all the cards let you replace the CPU, so you can increase your performance as needed without replacing your entire Macintosh could compete quite well on a price/performance basis with PCs. And now that you can efficiently run Mac and PC software from the same machine, you can have the best of both worlds. How long will it be before your coworkers with PCs come to the same realization?”

In 1999, John Rizzo (from above) published a book entitled “Macintosh Windows Integration 1999: Integratig Your Macintosh with Windows 95/98 and Windows NT Environment". Rizzo again talks about the speed of OrangePC’s hardware solution.

“I once found that SoftWindows and Virtual PC running on a 300 MHz Power Macintosh G3 to run at approximately the same speed as a 166 MHz OrangePC card, then Orange Micro’s slowest, cheapest card. The problem was that as soon as I had published the test results at MacWindows.com, the lowest available Pentium compatible on the Orange PC card became 200 MHz, which once again outperformed the emulators. (At the time of this writing, 400 MHz Pentiums-compatibles were available for the OrangePC card.) This pattern has continued, with emulators running on the fastest, highest-priced avaible Macs models just about reaching the speed of the the slowest, cheapest Pentium card.

On the higher end of the OrangePC line, the coprocessor cards can yield more than 10 times the speed of emulators on the fastest Mac. This also has been true for many years now, and trends indicate that emulators will be slower than most Pentium cards. The x86-to-PowerPC translation step simply devours processing power. “

Did you ever use an OrangePC? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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