Re: Power Mac 6100 experiences?

Bruce Carter (bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu)
Tue, 12 Mar 1996 03:07:24 EST

At 10:43 PM 3/11/96, Emmett Hoops wrote:
>My school is thinking of buying a Power Mac 6100/60 with the PC chip, and
>16MB of Ram. If you have any experience with this computer, please let us
>know all the positives and all the negatives. It will be our only computer
>purchase this year, so your input is vital.

This is what I have on my desk at work (although I have 24M of RAM for the
Mac and 8M on the 486 card). It works great for almost everything. For
the things that it doesn't work great with, it tends not to work at all.
For example, many games write directly to various hardware, especially
video cards. Some of these don't work properly with the 6100/DOS Mac (e.g.
the Mechwarrior 2 demo on the network, and presumably the real product,
bail out with a video card problem). Another problem is in networking.
You can run any protocol on either part of the machine, but you can't run
the same protocol on both parts of the machine. For example, I run MacTCP
(well, OpenTransport now, but nevertheless...) on the Mac side, so I can't
use TCP/IP on the PC side unless I disable it on the Mac. Right now, this
isn't a problem for me as I run AppleTalk and IP on the Mac and IPX on the
PC. Yet a third potential problem is with live video input. There isn't
any... *heh*. No current way to pipe, for instance, output from a
laserdisc player through to the PC side of things. Digital video works
fine, though.

Other than that, I'm quite pleased. I do a lot of ToolBook stuff on this setup.

--
Bruce Carter, Instructional Software Designer     (208)385-1851@voice
Boise State University, Boise, ID  83725          (208)385-1856@fax
http://mentor.idbsu.edu/BruceCarter/home.html     bcarter@mentor.idbsu.edu