Geforce 6200 and OS 9

[Tempest]

I have a Geforce 6200 crammed into my G4 Cube (with a fan) and it seems to work just fine in OS X, but there are some games that don't like Classic so I occasionally boot into OS 9.2. However the 9200 only provides on resolution under OS 9 and thousands of colors. My computer however says it's doing MILLIONS of colors and I can't seem to change it to Thousands. I know it was doing Thousands before, but after clearing the PRAM it seems stuck on Millions with no option to change it.

I've tried running games like Diablo and it says I need a monitor supporting 256 colors and 640 x 460 resolution (which is what I'm using). I think it's the color thing that may be throwing it off, is there a way to fix this?

Tempest

 

[Gorgonops]

My vague understanding is that the GeForce 6200 is only "supported" under OS 9 to the extent that OS 9 is able to use it as a dumb framebuffer at whatever its Open Firmware BIOS detects as your monitor's "Native Resolution". (Or 640x480 if autodetection fails.) It really is fundamentally an OS X-only card. The reason it's so common as an upgrade for older Macs is that 6200s are A: dirt cheap, B: easily flash-able, and C: it's the weakest, cheapest GPU that supports Core Image acceleration. (Also, for Cube hackers there's D: The 6200 is a low-power card and produces much less heat than an older card of similar speed.)

Not having one the only thing I might suggest is booting into OS X, setting the video mode and color depth you want, and rebooting into OS 9 to see if the values stick.

 

[ppuskari]

This isn't quite the same, but I use the 6200 (PCI) because it's the fastest PCI card that is fully supported in OSX 10.4.11 on my B&W G3/G4 450 upgraded machine. If someone knows of a faster PCI OSX supported card please let me know.

I had to flash it and it was only 40 bucks a couple years ago and yes it was easy to do. So I totally agree with the below comments. I get 1024/768 256 colors in OS9 but full accell and full colors with full resolution switching in OSX. It makes that G4 450 machine seem MUCH faster than it really is especially in OpenGL apps etc.

I don't need much color space in os9 on that machine since I use it mainly for file archiving and stuffing and hqxing of the sort then flip back over to OSX land to do everything else, or use the other B&W G3 350 machine next to it that has the Sonnet pci video card in it that works great with OS9, but not OSX.

 

[Tempest]

Setting the options in OS X didn't carry over to OS 9. Looks like I'll have to use Classic for my gaming. Things seem to be working through Classic so far.