Jon,
We have taken the other route to the cross platform approach. It seemed
easeir and more cost effective to get good/ to great but not super PC's
and Macs. We run office and graphics application on the macs and CAD/CAM
on the PC's. We use Miramar Systems PC MacLan to get data to the Macs
with great sucess. The primary data interchange is either DXF, STL, or
in 2D in Deneba canvas which is entirely cross platform and will handle
DXF/DWG fairly well in either platform.
We chose to migrate to PC because, in my judgement the price/performance
was not there for the mac for all the work arrounds to get to the
machince tools. A decent PC is still about 2/3 the price of a similar
generation of MAC. YOu can soup up the Mac like Jon's but then you are
paying big bucks. (Although his machine sounds really cool) Also we
needed more and more diverse worstations so souping up one computer did
not make sense. I tried SoftPC for a while but at the time (5 years ago
on an old Centris 650 ) it was so slow as to be unusable except for batch
overnight file translations.
My suggestion is that if you are going to spend 4K for a piece of
software I would rater spend annother 1-2K on a good new box rather than
run under emulation. You could keep the same screen and keyboard with a
switch (there are cross platform ones).
I am always on the fence though as I find the Mac upkeep easier and I am
still more comfortable with the OS. If you learn a program from scratch
on the PC though it makes very little difference.
Probably the bottom line is what you are going to be using it for - If
you will be doing any significant rendering/shaqding etc, I would be
worth finidng out if the rendering under emulation will be dog ass slow
or not. If you are just exploring/learning and will be doing most of
your work on a the MAC or need to move your PC work to the MAC to go to
the graphics world then I wouldn't worry about it.
Charles
William D. Richards 12/31/99 7:25 PM WROTE:
>At 10:04 AM -0600 12/29/99, Jonathan Chertok wrote:
>>An "intro" question for the list.
>>Can anyone tell me if it is possible to run rapid prototyping type
>>software on the new Macintosh G3 or G4 processors?
>>I am looking to pick up a personal computer to begin very modest
>>work on rapid prototyping software such as
>>Pro-Engineer
>>Materialise
>>Paraform
>>Deskartes
>>etc.
>>I know I can run FormZ and MINICAD on a Macintosh and am trying to
>>find out if I can do tutorials and limited "intro" work on the new
>>MAC's. Also wondering whether it may be reasonable to use "Virtual
>>PC" software to make these programs compatible with the G3 or G4
>>chips.
>>I'd prefer to stick with my beloved MAC if possible and don't need
>>industrial size strength for this initial work.
>>
>>If this is not possible, any suggestions for minimum requirements,
>>brand of computers, configurations should I decide to go non-MAC for
>>this at home use?
>>
>>Thanks list,
>>
>>Jon Chertok
>>Austin, Texas
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