The problems in cross platform compatibility between the PC market and the Mac market had always been one that Apple had addressed ever since the introduction of the SuperDrive that allowed DOS disks to be read from/written to in Mac OS. Sometimes though this wasn't enough and several DOS cards had been released for the Mac that allowed users to actually run DOS software on their Mac.

Taking the ageing Quadra 610, Apple fitted a dedicated DOS card and released 25,000 such units to see how the market responded. They were rapidly snapped up by enthusiastic buyers. Technically this was not new territory as many users had already fitted such cards to their own machines but it at least meant that Apple were aware of what users were up to and the Apple version had the option of fitting RAM directly to the DOS card (to stop it from sharing memory with the Mac side of things).

Away from the DOS card, the Quadra 610DOS was very much a regular Quadra 610 with the only difference being that the one expansion slot was now taken up by the DOS card.