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!
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.
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.
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).