[bbxstudio]

Orange Micro used to make PCI cards with Pentiums on them for creating dual-boot systems... anything like that still around for G4s or am I stuck buying a Wintel box?

[SupahCoolX]

I haven't heard of those in a long time. You might want to look into Virtual PC. It lets you run Windows (or any other non-Mac OS) by emulating a PC environment. I hear it's gotten pretty good lately.
www.connectix.com

[Earth Mk. II]

Unless what essentially would turn out to be a PC motherboard is on the PCI card, complete with it's own memory system (i.e. it won't/can't share the mac's RAM) and possibly it's own GPU, I'd imagine the relative slowness of the PCI bus would choke any recent (within the past ~5 years) CPU placed on it to the point where price/performance just won't be worth it.

Not to mention the heat that card would throw off if it included a P4, or even a slower PIII chip.

If you go all the way down to a Celeron or PII - why bother? VPC will probably be a better performer (on a recent Mac system) for most things in that case.

If you'll be needing a PC for anything that puts a heavy load on the GPU, you'll want a real PC box anyway. Placing a x86 chip on a PCI bus would effectively negate any advantages you'd gain from using an AGP card.

It all depends on what you want to do. If you really need speed and graphics, get a PC box. If you just need something that can run Windows apps, then you'll probably be able to manage with VPC. AFAIK, no one offers a PC card anymore.

YMMV.

[tooki]

Yes, they actually were complete PCs on a PCI card, they only shared storage and the monitor (but not the graphics chip, that was separate: they used special Y cables that connected the Mac's graphics to the card to the monitor, so only one platform had control over the monitor at any given time).

But even back then, you could buy an entire PC system, including a decent monitor, for the same or less money than an Orange Micro card, so unless you desperately needed to save space, they weren't economically feasible.

tooki