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$52 on eBay

mst3k

mst3k

6502
Badly yellowed, sold 'as is' and 'powers on' Mac 9600-300 on eBay.
Listed with no info on the internals. Bid $52 and won.
4gb IBM HDD
4gb Quantum HDD
Apple 24x CD
768mb RAM
400ghz Newer Tech accelerator
Working Zip drive
Working FDD
USB card
SCSI card
Imagine2 Number 9 PCI video card.

Everything works perfectly. No issues. Just a few dust bunnies and some grime.
Boots into 9.1 and loaded with all sorts of interesting things.
Case needs a good cleaning, maybe a retro-bright. No cracks or dings.
Sometimes, you just get lucky.
PXL_20240324_151102252.jpg
 
Looks like a Formac video card. A Proformance II 80 perhaps?

Nice find. The 9600s are great and flexible retro machines. The main quirk is that it can be picky about where you put PCI cards in relation to each other, so if you're having issues with a card ever, try moving them around.

Also, the two SCSI busses are different speeds, so put the CD and zip on the slow one, and hard disk on the fast one.
 
Which one is fast and which is slow? I have everything on one. As you can see in the photo (although I am now putting it back together), I've been using the outside bus (nearest the edge).

Also attached a photo of the video card.

Thanks!
Phipli said:
Looks like a Formac video card. A Proformance II 80 perhaps?

Nice find. The 9600s are great and flexible retro machines. The main quirk is that it can be picky about where you put PCI cards in relation to each other, so if you're having issues with a card ever, try moving them around.

Also, the two SCSI busses are different speeds, so put the CD and zip on the slow one, and hard disk on the fast one.
Click to expand...
 

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Congratulations! A great machine - I have one myself. Now find an 800MHz or 1GHz Sonnet G4 cpu, and watch it fly!
 
mst3k said:
Terrific Phipli. Really appreciate the info.
Click to expand...
Can you grab the drivers (any extensions and control panels) for your card? I don't think they're online. It's a fairly unusual card. The Formac card sold reasonably in Europe, but the Number9 branded ones don't show up too often :)
 
Phipli said:
Can you grab the drivers (any extensions and control panels) for your card? I don't think they're online. It's a fairly unusual card. The Formac card sold reasonably in Europe, but the Number9 branded ones don't show up too often :)
Click to expand...
Let me look again, but I didn't see any. There are ATI drivers but nothing named Number 9 or Formac.
I found some possible drivers on the Mac Repository but haven't had a chance to try them yet.
 
mst3k said:
Let me look again, but I didn't see any. There are ATI drivers but nothing named Number 9 or Formac.
I found some possible drivers on the Mac Repository but haven't had a chance to try them yet.
Click to expand...
They might be called Hawkeye or GA. If it is GA, that is the same as the Formac driver.

I notice on pictures elsewhere that the PCB itself actually says Formac on it, so they must have designed the Mac board. I'm wondering if Formac sold it in Europe and Number Nine sold it in the US.
 
Phipli said:
Can you grab the drivers (any extensions and control panels) for your card? I don't think they're online. It's a fairly unusual card. The Formac card sold reasonably in Europe, but the Number9 branded ones don't show up too often :)
Click to expand...
There is an ISO of a Formac driver CD up on the Macintosh Garden.

As for Number9 (<accent="Japanese">number 9, number 9, number 9 ...</accent>), isn't it made by Initio? I couldn't find the drivers offhand but I'm fairly sure that I have seen them in the last few years. Perhaps you'll have more luck on archive.org.
 
ArmorAlley said:
There is an ISO of a Formac driver CD up on the Macintosh Garden.
Click to expand...
Yes, I have the Formac drivers, their card isn't a Formac version, so they may have a different set of drivers that aren't on Macintosh Garden, and so it would be good to rescue them. Also, it is good to capture different versions of software.
ArmorAlley said:
As for Number9 (<accent="Japanese">number 9, number 9, number 9 ...</accent>), isn't it made by Initio? I couldn't find the drivers offhand but I'm fairly sure that I have seen them in the last few years. Perhaps you'll have more luck on archive.org.
Click to expand...
Number Nine is the company that made the chipset. It isn't made by Initio. Other people made cards using Number Nine hardware, like Formac.
 
Phipli said:
Yes, I have the Formac drivers, their card isn't a Formac version, so they may have a different set of drivers that aren't on Macintosh Garden, and so it would be good to rescue them. Also, it is good to capture different versions of software.

Number Nine is the company that made the chipset. It isn't made by Initio. Other people made cards using Number Nine hardware, like Formac.
Click to expand...
Greetings,
I've been thru everything and everywhere I can think of to look for extensions, panels, drivers specific to the Number Nine card without any luck.
I did look for 'GA' and 'Hawkeye' in addition to Number Nine and Imagination. All I can find are ATI files.
I'm thinking there was an ATI card and whoever owned this switched out to #9 card without updating drivers?
If you have any specific search locations or other files to hunt for. I'd be happy to do so. I found the Formac drivers online and was going to install them. Not sure what benefit that would be but I think I'm leaving some functionality on the table without the correct software.
Thanks again for the info!
This is my first machine with OS 9 and I'm impressed. I've kind of avoided anything above 7.6 and below X due mostly to not having hardware specific to those, but this is a pretty cool OS. The hardware is surprisingly fast.
 
mst3k said:
Greetings,
I've been thru everything and everywhere I can think of to look for extensions, panels, drivers specific to the Number Nine card without any luck.
I did look for 'GA' and 'Hawkeye' in addition to Number Nine and Imagination. All I can find are ATI files.
I'm thinking there was an ATI card and whoever owned this switched out to #9 card without updating drivers?
If you have any specific search locations or other files to hunt for. I'd be happy to do so. I found the Formac drivers online and was going to install them. Not sure what benefit that would be but I think I'm leaving some functionality on the table without the correct software.
Thanks again for the info!
Click to expand...
I suspect the Formac GA drivers will work fine for you and it is an excellet card for everything other than 3D (I think it might technically support Quickdraw3D, but only untextured so basically useless). Shout if you have any trouble getting it working with acceleration. One thing they're very good at is rendering fonts - you'll find it scrolls text documents very quickly for the era.


mst3k said:
This is my first machine with OS 9 and I'm impressed. I've kind of avoided anything above 7.6 and below X due mostly to not having hardware specific to those, but this is a pretty cool OS. The hardware is surprisingly fast.
Click to expand...
I actually prefer running 8.6 on them - I usually dual boot 8.6 and 9.1 or 9.2.2. But yes, the PCI professional macs were generally excellent machines and very under appreciated. Until recently there were also loads of cheap PCI cards for them online. Some PC cards do work with them though. Just about any FireWire card works and NEC chipset USB cards. A good card to find is a combo USB + FW card that has an NEC chip.

What sort of thing are you into? They're great for music composition (RB-388, Reason 1, Cubase VST 4.1) and there is loads of video (Premiere 5, early versions of Final Cut, VideoShop??) and drawing / painting / image editing software (Photoshop 5, Painter 5, Illustrator 8), 3D (Bryce, Poser, Strata 3D) and games (MDK, Diablo, F/A-18 3 and Korea, Marathon Infinity... Perhaps Quake 1 and Unreal 1? Trying to remember the minimum specs).
 
ArmorAlley said:
I found this on a search in archive.org but the download didn't work for me.
Click to expand...
Thanks - you confirmed that Hawkeye drivers do work with the Number Nine Imagine 128 II. I wasn't sure.

Here is Hawkeye 5.6.1. I went on a hunt for software yesterday.

I've also attached some older versions, but... Virus check the others because they're not from the official site.
 

Attachments

Phipli said:
Thanks - you confirmed that Hawkeye drivers do work with the Number Nine Imagine 128 II. I wasn't sure.

Here is Hawkeye 5.6.1. I went on a hunt for software yesterday.

I've also attached some older versions, but... Virus check the others because they're not from the official site.
Click to expand...
Just checked them - the version "4" is actually another copy of 4.5, and Disinfectant doesn't find any viruses.

Uploaded here for future reference :

 
Last edited:
Here's a picture of the box it came in, if you're interested. I had one at one time.
 

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