While I have been getting to know the peculiarities of running and modifying a beige box, most of the weirdness has been Open Firmware related, especially concerning the drive busses.
Except for this! As I moved my CPU and DVD-ROM drives from my B&W Yosemite, there has been no trouble running those on my beige G3. Another thing I expected would be extremely simple was to drop my B&Ws original Rage128 video card in as well. The 2MB Rage Pro chip is NOT going to be my only video in Jaguar! But so far, I have yet to get the card to work.
Why this baffles me is that I know OS 9.2 installs ATI drivers, including Rage128. Still, no signal out of the card. I installed the latest update from ATI, which gives me newer drivers and the ATI control panel, but the panel shows the cruddy onboard Rage Pro chip as being the only ATI video on board! There does not appear to be any way to select what specific card it should use. I know the card works perfectly, I just carefully pulled and bagged it from my recently upgraded B&W, using ESD precautions.
One way I screwed everything up: I noticed in the Monitors control panel that there were two monitors shown! I assumed that the one with the smiley mac startup and menu was the built-in chip, and the second was my as of yet unused Rage128. So I dragged the startup and menu over to the new screen and restarted. Instead of Rage128 output I got built-in output with no menu bar! The two "monitors" I was choosing from were the SAME video. I don't know why I had two separate outputs, I don't know how to toggle between then to make two usable desktops. My only solution was to reinstall 9.2, which was painless as it was freshly loaded an hour before.
I have heard of people using other ATI cards on their beige boxes, but since the ATI controls are automatic in recognizing the hardware, I don't know how I can use the new card. The drivers are there, what else should I need to do?! On my B&W I install the OS and it recognizes and uses the 128 before I even load any system or drivers... I find no info on any special tricks needing to be done. System Profiler recognizes that it is an ATI PCI display card. It has taken me three days to TRY to get Jaguar running, I don't want to spend days reinstalling OS 9 as well!
Was easy. Turns out that the "two" video devices which the OS was seeing were the Mach64 multisync output AND the VGA adaptor which was connected to it! It didn't occur to me that the adaptor would be a device, I assumed it was passively jumpering one connector pinout to another.
So I started with all extensions off, the Rage128 card pulled out. Erased the ATI Resource Manager extension. Restarted. Re-installed the ATI drivers. Powered off. Installed Rage128 card and removed VGA adaptor from built-in video.
I connected my VGA monitor to the Rage128, and as soon as the box started there was ordinary video output from the card! Looks great, the colors are much richer than those from the 3D Pro chip. Now if somebody needs to find answers to solve this silly predicament they can read this. Remove your VGA adaptor!
By having the adaptor in place the Mac was being told that there was a monitor inplace. ie. the adaptor shorted the appropriate pins for the monitor sense lines, as if a monitor was really plugged in. VGA doesn't do sense lines, but it does do uh, the whatsit thing, DDI?, that the monitor can send it's specs to the computer. Macs witht he older Mac style plug don't do that very well. Any way, if you had plugged in a VGA monitor to the adaptor when nothing was showing, I'd bet it would come right one and show as the main display...