After a tweet from Paul Rickards about a product called MacCharlie, I just had to dive a bit deeper, and I found this short article on Low End Mac.
Although PC compatibility isn’t a big deal since Apple’s transition to Intel CPUs in 2006, there is a long history of PC emulation and DOS cards that let Macs run PC operating systems and software. Dayna’s MacCharlie was the first solution to the “problem” of PC compatibility.
Introduced on April 2, 1985, MacCharlie was taken by many to be an April Fools joke. MacCharlie was essentially a DOS PC that clipped to a Macintosh. The MacCharlie device had 256 KB of RAM, a double-sided 5-1/4″ floppy drive, and a “keyboard extender” that added all of the “missing” keys from a PC keyboard to the Mac’s keyboard. MacCharlie could be expanded to 640 KB of RAM (the most PCs of that era could handle) and by adding a second 5-1/4″ floppy drive, which is the configuration of MacCharlie Plus.
I’ve always been fascinated by products like this. I used to have a Sun Ultra V, and one of the products I most wanted to have was one of those x86 expansion cards that basically added an entire Intel PC to an UltraSPARC machine so you could run DOS and DOS programs on your SPARC machine. Similar products have been available for other kinds of non-x86 workstations, and it’s still something I want to experience at some point.
At a school i attended we had Acorn (risc) machines that had a switch you could flip to instantly flip over to windows. They had a similar pc-extension-card i assume, cant remember, but it I remember being very impressed by RiscOS and the hardware. Way ahead of its time!
The last Acorn machines (the RiscPC) had a particularly neat version of this. The computer was designed so two CPU cards could share the system bus, memory, peripherals and all. So the PC coprocessor was simply a card with a 486 or 5×86 CPU and glue logic, which slotted in next to your existing ARM processor card: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/32bit_UpgradesA2G/Acorn_…
The rest of the magic was done with software: an app for RISC OS that let you fire up the x86 card and boot it either full-screen or in a window (felt like magic in 1995!) and some special DOS device drivers that indirected sound, video etc. through RISC OS.
The upshot was a *nearly* IBM compatible DOS, Windows 3.1, and (just) Windows 95 machine that was reasonably priced (if you already had a RiscPC) and decently fast. On the downside, it didn’t fully copy all of the implementation details of real PCs, so it failed on many games and never made it to Windows 98. And the hardware design was for 486 chips, so 133Mhz 5×86 chips was as fast as it ever got.
I remember installing Windows 98SE on my Acorn RiscPC and it was working fine.
It was cool but not much of real use and the disk operations were really slow as it was basically running from virtual drive. I had SCSI card also installed and even if it was supposed to be possible to install to own drive and real partition instead of a file inside of RISC OS filesystem, I never managed to get it install.
I had trouble even with Windows 95 OSR2 and was pretty sure that Windows 98 was believed to be a total no-go. Fascinating!
Disc performance was always bad; the RiscPC’s primary IDE interface was never fast and, as you said, the usual setup was to use a file on the RISC OS hard disc as the DOS/Windows drive. I never tried the directly-allocated SCSI drive option, as I didn’t have a machine with a SCSI interface until 2000, well after PC cards were viable for main use. The price of a second SCSI hard drive for an experiment was too much for me…
OMG I also have a Ultra 5 (hope my dad has not disposed of it yet
) and had no idea about the existence of x86 expansion cards for those machines! Geil! I need to turn it on again and experiment.
I did not know about this, but it reminds me of the Amiga Sidecar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Sidecar), which was similar in concept but more advanced in some ways.
Every day I am grateful for the fact that computers are powerful enough these days to emulate other platforms, without having to resort to this sort of duplication of hardware.
The 1060 Sidecar was an interesting achievement but ultimately dreadfully wasteful. It sucked engineering talent away from making the Amiga platform better and only ever existed as an expansion for the Amiga 1000. The A1000 was never a big hit and was quickly eclipsed with the 500 and 2000.
Within a handful of years after the Sidecar was introduced I was running an entirely software based MS-DOS emulator, PCTask on my 20MHz 68030 expanded A1200. It wasn’t much but it let me run DOS Word and connect to GEnie with the DOS client. There was an Amiga GEnie client which was superior in almost every way – except that it didn’t have the NTN Trivia game. Other than having a 5 1/4″ floppy drive built in there wasn’t much of anything an A1000 w/ an A1060 Sidecar could do that a circa 1989 Amiga with PCTask couldn’t do.
Back then I was using a forgotten sw emulator (ibem) on a vanilla A2000 just for coding in Turbo Pascal that was the language teached at my high school.
Shortly after I got a used A2088XT where the Borland compiler was literally flying
I used and Amiga 2000 (still have it, somewhere) and all I wanted was the bridgeboard (IBM 8080/386SX emulation) and the Amax (Mac emulation).
Just the idea of having a Amiga/PC/Mac machine in the same box was amazing to me.
I saw an article recently about the QNAP Mustang-200 accelerator – it’s basically a dual-socket Intel i7 system that fits in PCI-e.
There are ARM and POWER9 (Talos) boards with PCIe, so, that would fit the criteria too.
I had a couple of iterations of the SUNWpc board in Ultra 10s over the years. The principal was very cool but the execution of the concept produced some frustration, mostly with finding the intersection of a version of Windows worth running and that was still supported by the board, and a reasonable version of Solaris that supported the board. Who wanted to stick with Solaris 7 (or 8) just to be able to say you could run some Win32 stuff?
In the end, it was less frustrating to ditch the boards and put a PC under my desk and use separate systems. It gave me more screens and a saner environment. Since the PC and Solaris boxes had access to the same networks, separate systems were not a logistical challenge.
Having said that, putting my collectors hat on, I wouldn’t mind having one today.
I too had these and IMHO, you didn’t miss much. But still, in the mid-late 90’s I suppose it was interesting.
Yeah, I have one of the 5×86 cards but haven’t’ bothered to try it out yet… (probably will throw it in my HyperStation 30 DIY build), DIY since I only have the motherboard not the case.
Apparently it could run 3 286 dos boxes in addition to the main windows session… that’d be pretty neat and I could see a lot of people back then using that to multi task outside windows directly in separate dos boxes.
I wish someone would make an affordable PCI-E card with a MIPS chip, an ARM chip, and a PPC Chip so we could virtualise other platforms in Qemu and accelerate them.
This reminds me of the old Apple PowerMac 6100 which I worked on a few decades ago. It had a full PC on a card and you could copy/paste between the Mac and Windows OS. They were both running simultaneously and you had a keyboard shortcut to switch between them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_6100
Looks nice
http://archive.retro.co.za/mirrors/68000/www.vintagemacworld.com/ch…
but, got then from recyclers:
The MacCharlie was pretty slow, and the graphics never worked. There was a plate under the Mac plus that held it into place.
The Sun/486 was only a DX-25 and never got to plug it in.
The NuBus cards, AST 286 was also dog slow.
We found an Orange/PC nubus card, but the software was not to be found.
The 486 card for the 6100 was pretty nifty, but again, ran software for the older generation of PCs.
These were almost exclusively co-processors that needed to completely take over the machine.
The coolest co-processors were the Radius Rocket cards with Rocket-Share. Multiple Macs in one box. Apple of course had to stop that as quickly as possible.
There is the relatively common SunPC and SunPCI cards (SunPC is up to a AMD 586 on an Sbus card). The SunPCI were up to 1.6Ghz AMD Athlon XP 2100+.
Also there was the Ross SparcPlug (I have one of the standalone models) it was intended to plug into a 5.25 front bay, and be usable via ethernet on the PC case it was in, or it could be used standalone as well in it’s own case since it had one sbus slot for a framebuffer.