Tack a little extra onto that cost, since you’ll want to replace the standard 16MB of RAM with at least 32MB. The only card that was ready by the time I conducted my tests was the least expensive of the company’s three 200MHz cards, the $549 OrangePC 626. Orange Micro’s Pentium cards are much better able to play PC games than their software siblings, but they do so at a cost. You could buy a ton of RAM, reduce the game’s display size, and turn off sounds and textures to get a stripped-down version of the game to limp along, but is all that really worth it? (Here’s a hint: no.)

Under software emulation, Age of Empires was playable although sluggish BattleZone, on the other hand, was an exercise in frustration. I installed two PC-only games for the test: Microsoft’s Age of Empires, which has the modest requirement of a 90MHz Pentium processor, and Activision’s BattleZone, which requires a 120MHz Pentium processor but recommends at least 166MHz. I put these software emulators and the lowest-priced Orange Micro card on a Power Mac G3/300 with 128MB of RAM to see how they stacked up. Orange Micro provides the only Pentium cards available, ranging in base price from $549 to $849 (714/779-2772, The problem is that these packages are running an operating system within an operating system, which results in a performance hit. (Insignia also offers RealPC, a $79 DOS-only version.) ), two software packages that run Windows 98 right on your Mac.

) and Insignia Solutions’ SoftWindows 98 ($169 company’s estimated price 510/360-3700, The affordable stuff consists of Connectix’s VirtualPC 2.1 ($160 650/571-5100, PC emulation comes in two varieties: affordable (software) and not so affordable (hardware). No longer do you have to stand outside the window of your mall’s electronic-gaming boutique, drooling over the vast bounty of delectables beyond the glass-you can have them all right now! Did you hear that? Do you realize what that means? If you own a Mac, you have access to all the software on either platform (including the latest PC-only games), right now, just by running a PC emulator.

Know what a Macintosh can do that a PC can’t? If you said, “Maintain its owner’s sanity,” you’d be right! However, I was going for something a tad less caustic: Macs can emulate PCs, but PCs can’t yet emulate Macs.

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