Panther + Formac Proformance card issue

[Toad]

I have a Mac G4/450/AGP with the original AGP/ATI graphics card and a second Formac Proformance card in a PCI slot driving an SGI TFT 1600 flatpanel display (old, but still very nice)

The same system running Jaguar worked fine. Now I upgraded to Panther and it just wont see the Formac card.

It just stays gray and the Displays control panel does not report a second card (although the System Profiler does see it as a GA12) - I have a default spacy blue desktop background on my main screen and just gray on the Formacs SGI flatpanel.

The Formac.com site is less than helpful (nothing relevant there) and the only drivers I could find were System 9 control panels.

Do I need a special OS X control panel for the Formac Proformance card ? Or is it a hardware problem of some sort ? (I tried booting with cmd-alt-P-R to zap my parameter RAM, held it for 3 beeps just in case, but same results)

Can anybody help me ?
Thanks
Toad

PS I dont know whether thats useful additional information, but after waking up from sleep, the SGI flatpanel doesnt even show gray, just black as if it wasnt getting any video signal at all...


PPS: just found this at apple support:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25582
Summary: you must install a new 3rd party driver BEFORE installing Panther even if everything worked in Jaguar.
This is very sad. Almost as lousy as windows installers. And thats what you buy $130 upgrade for ?

The link to the formac web site sadly provides no info at all. Formac UK at least has the old drivers available:
http://www.formac.com/p_bin/index_uk.html?cid=help_support_proformance3

 

[TENBLUE7™]

Formac...

...I used to run a ProFormance 3 PCi card on my second Apple CRT monitor until I upgraded to Jaguar from 9.2.2 - it worked no more.

After a few days of research I found that Formac offer no OS X support at all and that to get a Formac PCi graphics card to work on any machine running 10.2 or later is nothing short of a miracle.

I eventually sold the Formac on ebay and bought a Radeon 7000 which is amazing.

Sorry man wish I could be the bearer or good news but it seems they just don't care...

 

[RichP]

my sympathies, if for nothing more than I used to run the SGI panel back in my PC days, and that monitor, in terms of image quality and dot pitch, still is one of the best around.

Only thing I could suggest is to look into getting a DVI-LVD (SGi's "multilink connector) converter; SGI made one, but it wasnt cheap. However, you then get the option of using any videocard you chose.

 

[Toad]

Yes, I would dump the card in a heartbeat for something faster, but it is the only Mac card that I am aware of that can drive the SGI 1600 flatpanel (it was one of the first and came with a plug / interface that NO ONE else supports any more)

So it appears I may be stuck with Jaguar for now. I can't imagine why they would kill off previously supported video cards...perhaps just "dot zero release" glitch. I am hoping

 

[TENBLUE7™]

...Bummer.

From what I know OS X has Graphics Cards drivers built in ala windows (Oh Dear) and like you mentioned when I first booted in Jaguar I got a black screen and the card was found on the system profiler but had no drivers or ID number etc.

Apple probably wanted a nice fat sum of money for developing and including Formac drivers, I imagine ATi makes a lot more money than Formac, being multi platform and most importantly being the AGP and PCi card of choice with apple.

One hand feads the other if you know what I mean.

 

[RichP]

http://sgi.com/products/legacy/multilink/

search for one of those on ebay; realize, because apple makes 1600x1024 resolution panels, it wont be an issue for you to run the SGI using that adapter.

 

[jayscheuerle]

Same with ATI xClaim 3D plus

Only shows as 16 grey, 640x480. Can't change it.

Someone posted a terminal command fix for this and the Formac in the Apple discussion forums, but it only made my machine not start up and required a reinstall...

Trying Panther on one monitor for a day or two just to get the feel...