A real 200mhz PC for as little as $399, and it works. The folks at Orange Micro deserve congratulations for that. However, this doesn't buy you a polished product well-integrated into the Mac environment.I had been using Virtual PC (from Connectix ) for several months, with great satisfaction except for the rather pokey performance. Virtual PC is a beautifully designed product, successfully implementing a fully-functional PC. Moreover, the user experience of Virtual PC is wonderful: it's beautifully designed and implemented, and everything flows logically. However, on my PowerMac 7300 (a 604e at 200mhz), I'd estimate that Virtual PC runs at the equivalent of a 33 to 40 mhz PC, at best. So, the prospect of having a real PC running at 200mhz, and for only $399, is greatly captivating. (The regular price of Orange PC is $499; at introduction, Orange Micro offered a competitive upgrade for Virtual PC users at $399.)
The out-of-the-box experience of OrangePC is not nearly as endearing as that of Virtual PC. While the new OrangePC 620 board is speedy it certainly has plenty of quirks. In fact, some of the "gotchas" could make Orange PC unusable for some users. The most severe problems are lack of any useful shared volume support, and problematic printing support. A host of smaller problems also arise.
I hadn't purchased the version 2.0 update of Virtual PC, since I assumed that the Orange PC board I had ordered would supercede a mere emulated solution. But after working with the Orange PC board, I expect that I'll get around to ordering the VPC update: it looks like I'll be needing VPC for quite a while yet.
Installation involves plugging in a PCI card, re-jiggering your video connections, and running an installer off the supplied CD. Not too bad, but improvements are in order.
- There is no printed manual. There is a single index card that provides confusing setup details, but that's it. All the meat is on a CD. It would be extremely helpful to have even a small pamphlet on setup, and basic operation.
- The manual reads as if it wasn't thoroughly tested. Some topics are poorly explained (e.g., connecting the video cable) while other areas omit or avoid subjects that should be of obvious concern (e.g., printing to non-PostScript printers on an AppleTalk network).
- It looks like the muffin fan on the board may make the board wider than a single PCI slot. If the board can be placed in the leftmost position, then it shouldn't get in the way of other slots. However, this may be a problem if someone is already doing that for some other board.
- Instructions on how to connect video cables are confusing. Even a single illustration in the CD document would help.
- Neither the provided "Video Loopback" cable nor the video out on the board itself fits standard Mac video plugs. There are two supplied adapters which provide the conversion, but the documentation made it sound like this would be atypical, rather than commonplace.
- The collection of adapters and the stiff loopback cable add 6 1/2 inches to the back of my computer. This would be a big problem if someone has tight desktop space.
- "Appendix F: Specifications" says that the video out is VGA. This does not appear to be the case; it seems to be Mac-standard video. If you have a VGA monitor, you still need a VGA converter.
- Here's some good news: Even on the bargain $399 package offered as an upgrade for Virtual PC users, Windows 95 is included. You just need to enter the OEM code that was provided with the copy of Windows that came with Virtual PC. This was a pleasant surprise, since it makes for a simpler installation.
The requirements stated in the manual are more stringent than those stated on the box:
On Appendix F: Box Specifications ----------- ---------------------- Computer ** Power Mac Hard disk free space 200M+ 400M+ OS ** Mac OS 8, or later Monitor ** MultiScan or MultiSync ** no mention of these on the box
In the parlance used by Virtual PC and Orange PC, a "shared volume" is file space that is available to the Mac as a conventional folder, and to the PC as a volume with its own drive letter.Plain and simple, Orange PC is NOT successful in implementing shared volumes. If you need to have a set of files and folders readily usable from both Mac and Windows, Orange PC will be troublesome for you.
All of this points out a mind-numbingly serious problem: it is impossible to reliably move files between the Mac and PC enviornments while the PC environment is running, except for perhaps some very simple cases (no more than a few files from one root level to another)! This is an appalling limitation.
- It is difficult (or perhaps impossible!) to run Windows applications resident on the shared drive: the system seemed to be confused about drive lettering, and apps seemed to be unable to find any files on this drive. As just one example, when running PKZip for Windows, the program was unable to locate any files on the shared drive. In further testing, I have not found any apps that use files that DO run successfully from the shared volume!
Astonishingly, Orange Micro tech support confirms that running apps from the shared volume is "not recommended". This inability to run apps from the shared drive is a very serious, major limitation, and will make Orange PC unsuitable for many potential users.
- In my first five minutes of use, I managed to freeze the system with a pretty undistinguished file copy. This excerpt from the "Troubleshooting" section of the OrangePC manual confirms that shared volumes don't work very well:
Problem: When copying large or multiple files from a Shared Volume to my C: Drive, the system freezes.
Solution: Shared Volumes works best when files are stored at the root level of the volume. Instead of creating sub- folders within a Shared Volume, try creating multiple shares.This is totally unacceptable, as it badly dillutes the whole point of having shared volumes. BTW, Virtual PC has no such problems with its shared volumes. More seriously, if I cannot use a simple file copy to backup my C drive files to the shared volume (or vice versa), it seriously affects the usability of the system.
- Virtual PC's implementation of "shared volumes" provides a host of practical benefits and good feelings. Here are some of the terrific time-savers made possible by Virtual PC's implementation of shared columns:
- All of my work felt safe and sound on a "real" Mac volume, removed from the vagaries and oddball inconsistencies of Windows.
- In my work, I use CodeWarrior on the Mac to build crossplatform libraries for Mac and Windows. With Virtual PC, I could update my Windows libraries simply by copying files to the folder that served as my shared volume for Virtual PC.
- While I use Delphi on the PC, I can't stand its editor and much prefer to use CodeWarrior's editor on the Mac. With a shared volume, it's easy to edit the same file from either editor.
- Backups of all my working Windows files took no special effort, inasmuch as they all resided on a conventional Mac volume. And, as we all know, anything that makes backups more difficult should be avoided.
But with Orange PC's inability to run PC apps from the shared volume, and quirky file copies involving the shared volume, all of these wonderful features are gone with Orange PC!
- If a file or a folder on the shared drive has a Mac name that is not a DOS-legal 8.3 filename, then that file or folder is not shown at all on the PC! Also, files with no data fork aren't shown at all either. This might lead to some serious user errors. For example, a user may think that an important file doesn't exist or has been deleted. By comparison, under Virtual PC 1.0 there is an attempt made to convert the name to a Windows-legal approximation. Moreover, VPC 2.0 is supposed to provide full compatibility with "long" Windows filenames on shared volumes.
- Shared volumes should allow use of the same set of files from the Mac, from Orange PC and from Virtual PC. Since Orange PC has serious handicaps when it comes to printing (see next section), it would be nice to be able to fire up Virtual PC for tasks that need printing. However, Orange PC's inadequancies with shared volumes closes off this option.
The closest workaround I've come up with is this: Say I'm working in Delphi, revising a print routine in my program. I can't print from the Orange PC environment (see next section), so I have to use Virtual PC. I build the application in Delphi, creating an EXE file. Since Orange PC requires me to use the C drive (it doesn't really support shared volumes) I now must exit Delphi and quit Windows. Next, I mount the Orange PC "C" drive on the Mac desktop. I launch Virtual PC, and direct it to use the Mac-mounted C drive image as a shared volume. Within Virtual PC, I launch my EXE file and try the print routine. If it doesn't work, then I get to undo all of these steps, go back to Orange PC to make the changes, and start all over.
In short, Orange PC's deficiencies have me by the cajones no matter which way I turn. I can't print, so I have to use Virtual PC to do that. But I can't share the same files in the same location without an awful lot of trouble, because Orange PC does a horrible job on running from shared volumes. And if I try to workaround by copying files from place to place involving shared volumes, well, Orange PC doesn't even do file copies very well either.
Well, I take that back a smidgen. There is one usable method for moving files between the Mac and PC environments: the floppy disk drive. But that is tricky. Here's what to do:
- With the PC environment visible, insert a floppy. (*)
- Copy files to the floppy.
- Eject the floppy typing Command-E. (*)
- Switch to the Mac.
- Re-insert the same floppy.
- Copy files from the floppy.
It is necessary to eject the floppy between environment swaps because the disk mount event was captured by OrangePC, and was not also passed on to the Mac environment. Since this disk eject is necessary, it would be just about as easy to simply have a separate PC and swap a floppy between machines.
The items marked "(*)" are followed by an awful lot of hard disk thrashing that I have not observed on my system except when using the OrangePC system in this way.
Virtual PC had printing beautifully implemented. VPC appears to do this by having a single Windows printer driver, already pre-configured, which thinks of the Mac environment as being one big printer. When you print, VPC "prints" to that driver, which on the Mac becomes a standard Mac print job that prints to whatever printer is selected in the Mac Chooser. For the user, it's simple and easy.It's irritating that Orange Micro didn't follow suit with as inspired a solution. Orange PC is not pre-configured for printing, even though it's going to be running on a Mac that almost certainly is already ready to print. You know you're in trouble when you discover that the manual (on the CD) says,
There are three methods of printing from the OrangePC, two of which are the most reliable and as simple as printing from any standalone PC.When you stop laughing in terror that the manufacturer thinks printing from a PC is "reliable and simple", next you'll feel anger when you discover how limited printing is from Orange PC. With the Orange PC 620, there really are only two printing options, printing to a PC printer on a PC network, and printing to a PostScript printer on an AppleTalk network. As far as I can discover, if your Mac is on an AppleTalk network with a non-PostScript printer (such as most ink jets), you can't print at all!! (You could kludge up a solution by adding special cables, converters and switchboxes, but that's damn irritating inasmuch as VPC is able to print without such Rube Goldberg machinations.)
If you do have a PostScript printer, you have to install the Windows drivers for the particular target printer. (Virtual PC does not require this, since it has its own printer driver that "prints" to the Mac.)
After all that, PostScript printing is implemented in a byzantine way. Here's how the OrangePC CD manual describes it:
Using the Orange Micro Emulated Parallel Port, Windows can send print jobs to the OrangePCi application, which will then create a generic Level1 PostScript file called "OrangePC Print.0" in the same location as the OrangePCi application. Once the file has been created, the OrangePCi application will immediately send the print job to whichever PostScript printer you have selected in your Chooser. When this process has been completed, the file will then be deleted.But even then, you are warned that this method is not always practical! The CD manual says,
This method of printing ... is not recommended for graphic intensive or large print jobs.Aaaarrrgghhh!
Orange PC's "Snapshot" application lets you see what is happening on the other platform, in either direction. This is very nice in a multi-processor situation like this. The practical value is limited to simply observing the other platform; no clicking, dragging or other interaction through Snapshot is permitted. If there is no need for a "picture-in-picture" display like this, then these windows simply consume screen real estate. Nonetheless, the Snapshot application must be running on the PC side in order for screen updates to be sent to the window on the Mac side. In the other direction, there does not appear to be a way of closing the Snapshot view of the PC without closing OrangePC altogether, except by hiding the application.
The Snapshot application window doesn't stay put: it has an annoying habit of periodically returning to some previous size and location.
The Snapshot window shows the Windows image pixel-for-pixel rather than WYSIWYG: If the Windows display is using 96 pixels per inch, then a figure that is two inches wide on Windows will be displayed as 2.7 inches wide in the Snapshot window on the Mac side. This makes it very difficult to use Snapshot to prepare screen shots using a Mac screen-grabbing utility. If instead the Windows inaccurately-named "print screen" function is used to grab a part of the screen, the Orange PC "Clipboard Exchange" program will translate the grabbed image on the clipboard. However, I have found that this graphic loses detail when scaled down, whereas a screen grab from the Mac, of a Virtual PC display for example, withstands a scaling much better.
On the Mac, clicking on the content area of the Snapshot window while it is in the background not only brings the app forward, it also acts on the click by immediately switching to Windows. Similarly, using the Mac application menu to switch to the OrangePC app causes a switch to Windows, rather than simply bringing the app forward.
These are not correct behaviors for Macintosh apps!!!
There is a checkbox setting to turn this off, but in my opinion the default setting should be the recognized, established interface standard.
Here are some oddities that occur with the default setting:
- Frequently, this odd behavior complete defeats the purpose of having Snapshot. Suppose you have a cluttered desktop in the Finder with lots of open windows, and Snapshot running somewhere behind with just a corner of the window showing. Now you'd like to see what's happening on the PC. You can't do it, except by rearranging your Finder windows and then clicking specifically on the title bar of the Snapshot window. Any other click or use of the application menu blasts you over to Windows, and then if you return to the Mac, you'll find that the Snapshot window is still underneath your Finder windows.
- What's REALLY jarring is if you quit a conventional Mac application while the OrangePC app is just behind. When the OrangePC app becomes the new frontmost app, blam-o, you're in Windows. Surprise!
- Even MORE jarring is just hiding a Mac app while the Orange PC app is just behind. The Orange PC app comes frontmost, and you are unceremoniously catapaulted to Windows. But when you try to return to the Mac, the application that was hidden reappears! All of this is very annoying, because it contaminates the clarity of the Mac environment; what should be a simple "Hide" command becomes a multi-step test of will.
- And possibly STILL more jarring is that certain events on the Mac side will snap you out of Windows without any user action at all. I was working in Windows, when suddenly I was zapped to the Mac side, apparently because an incoming FAX was successfully completed. Another time while in Windows, I found that I could no longer return to the Mac -- clicking on the "Switch To Mac" button did nothing. After a few more tries at that and other activities, the screen suddenly went pyrotechnic with multiple switches back and forth and some industrial-sounding clicking from the board in my Mac. When the commotion was over, the apparent cause was an alert on the Mac that my printer was out of paper.
As if bug-laden support for shared volumes and inability to print to a non-Postscript Appletalk printer weren't enough, there are a host of other oddities about the OrangePC system:
- What's with all the disk thrashing? Any time that I eject a floppy or a CD while under Windows, or quit the OrangePC application, there is some 10 seconds of so of hard disk conniptions, during which I have no use of my computer on either Mac or Windows. What's going on, and why?
- I bailed out (Ctrl-Alt-Del) of an attempt to copy files with the shared volume, and this apparently was sufficient to cream something or another on the Windows side. Upon the Windows re-boot, I got a message "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press return". I switched to the Mac, quit the OrangePC application. Upon restarting OrangePC, I was able to enter Windows after the usual ScanDisk falderol.
- After I installed an application (Delphi) on Windows, the installer requested a re-boot, reasonably enough. When I rebooted the PC, I got the same "boot disk failure" message. I had to command-M over to the Mac, quit the OrangePC app and re-launch it. This time Windows booted with only a few odd messages. However, all in all this was troubling behavior for a fairly normal, everyday task.
- "Setup" command: Whereas Virtual PC either applies setup changes immediately, or applies them upon next boot, OrangePC requires you to either do the setup changes when Windows is not running, or aborting current Windows session.
- :"Setup" is where you specify the volumes to be shared between the Mac and Windows environments. I happened to rename one of the Mac volumes to be used, and this made it unavailable on the Windows side. This kind of fragility is rampant in Windows, but it's not tolerated by Macintosh users. And this is a Mac specification, not a Windows specification.
- Launch the OPC application, and choose the File/Printer Status command. This crashes my machine immediately and consistently.
- There is a setting to set the Mac creator and filetype for files created on the shared disk from Windows. However, the app doesn't allow special symbols or punctuation, which are commonplace in these codes. For example, you can't set files to use BBEdit, which has creator code "R*ch".
- With the PC hard disk file mounted as a Mac volume, I couldn't revise the creator or type info of a file whose name ended with ".txt". This suggests a problem with Orange Micro's implementation of Apple's disk API. I tried using FileTyper and ResEdit to change these, but the change did not take place, even though the file's modification date was updated. I also tried writing a short program to see what happens on the API level. When I called FSpSetFInfo to change the file's type, the function returned an error value of zero, but there was no change in the type. In all cases, a file with a name ending ".txt" steadfastly insists on being type "TEXT" and creator "ttxt".
- The Mac application that provides access to the PC apparently uses pathnames to save its file references, rather than using file IDs or alias records, which is the correct thing for a Mac application to do. As a result, if you rename any of the folders in the hierarchy leading to the Orange PC app, you will get a snippy alert dialog.
- The Mac application gets easily confused about its window highlighting. Frequently, the window will be in its inactive state even though the app is topmost, making it impossible to resize the window.
- A preference item says "Fade screen when switching display". I don't see that it has any effect at all.
- When you shut down Windows, Windows displays its usual message about it now being safe to turn off your computer. At this point you must manually command-M to get back to the Mac, and then you have to quit the OrangePC app after an unnecessary cautionary dialog. On Virtual PC, when Windows is shut down, you are immediately and automatically returned to your Mac.
- Like Virtual PC, OrangePC creates a large Mac file to serve as the "C:" drive for Windows. However, it is used a little differently on the Mac. On VirtualPC, if you double-click this file when VPC isn't running, it mounts the file as a new drive image on the Mac desktop. On OrangePC, when you double-click this file it launches Windows and uses that file as the C: drive. This is kind of cool, because you can have multiple C drive files, and which one you double-click sets what "machine" you are using, in effect. On OrangePC, to mount the C drive file as a Mac volume, you need to drag the image to the DiskCopy app, which is supplied. Neither Virtual PC nor OrangePC allow you to mount the C drive file as a Mac volume if Windows is running.
- Unlike Virtual PC, Orange PC does not have any way to save the Windows session intact, and to restore it later. That's a pretty addicting and timesavings feature, and hard to give up.
- The "Page Up" key will successfully move a page up, but the "Page Down" key sometimes works, and sometimes causes a Mac beep and a return to the Mac environment.
- When the C drive file is mounted (by the version of Disk Copy that came with OrangePC) on the Mac as a new drive, it bears the inexplicable name "AP r o g r", at least on my machine. When I mount it using a more recent version of Disk Copy, it mounts as "untitled", a more understandable name.
- Mac folder windows allow you to command-click on the window title to see a popup list of the folder hierarchy; you can then choose any ancestor window for display. At least, that's the way it works on the native Mac, and Virtual PC's implementation correctly observes this. Orange PC's implementation does not, it just ignores the command-click.
So what is Orange Micro doing about these problems? When will a software update be issued? There are no answers forthcoming.
Despite blatant, obvious bugs, there has not been a software update in some time. This is jarring. The Orange Micro website has a woefully brief FAQ, a very old software update pre-dating the Orange PC card, and no clues about when we can expect any fixes.
- The logo for OrangePC is a melding of the Apple Computer logo and the Windows logo. Sounds like a wonderful opportunity to inspire two major litigation-loving companies to say "hi".
- The checklist supplied with the board itself says, "Processor: Cyrix Pentium Pro" (without using such words as "compatible" or "equivalent"). This is a Cyrix chip, and Intel has the trademark on "Pentium".
Orange PC puts a real PC in your Mac for a terrific price. If price is paramount, a 200mhz PC equivalent will do the job for you, and you don't need tight integration with the Mac environment, then the Orange PC is a tremendous bargain.But poor support for shared volumes and limited printing support are two devastating problems with Orange PC. There are numerous smaller problems as well.
Looking beyond price, if Orange PC is incapable of being a cooperative and polite citizen in the Mac world, then it really offers few advantages over a standalone PC. And since decent PCs with significantly higher performance are now available for under $1,000, the cheap price of the Orange PC may not be worth the hassle.
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