I forget who told me this, but I gotta thank the person who told me that 9.x is just 8.6 but with OS X junk.

To put it simply, the .sit file attached contains a few things that are nice to have assuming you have the hardware, because the OS 8.6 installer either doesn't have these things, or won't install them unless your machine has this functionality built in (and not via an add-in card).

• USB support extensions from 9.2.1 (including mass storage!)
• FireWire support extensions from 9.2.1
• Hard Disk SpeedTools FireWire/USB extensions (for good measure, shouldn't be required though)
• CarbonLib 1.4 (from 9.2.1)
• ATI extensions and Radeon 9200 extensions from 9.2.1

USB and FireWire normally should work on 8.6, but for whatever reason on my 9600, even if I have the very much supported add-in cards installed, 8.6 won't install any USB or FireWire extensions. Worse yet, Apple's official installers for these won't recognize my machine as capable of having USB, and thus will refuse to install. Worse yet, the 9.1 installer seems to skip these extensions as well, in my experience.

Which is why we say "screw that" and just grab those extensions ourselves from a capable 9.2 machine with all the hardware onboard. In my case, I grabbed the USB/FW extensions off my dual USB iBook. So, yes, if you have a capable OS 9 machine to grab these extensions from, you can easily do this yourself!

Where I hit trouble was the Radeon 9200. The drivers will only install in 9.2. If you try to install on 9.1 it will flat out refuse to install. So I had to install 9.2 on my 9600 via OS9Helper, install the Radeon 9200 drivers, and then grab all the relevant ATI extensions from that install. Fun times. I could have just left it on 9.2 but for whatever reason it feels like my 9600 runs like frozen ketchup on 9.2. So back down to 8.6 it goes.

I'm pleased to report, though, that everything works great on my 9600. Starts up fine. 9200 gets full acceleration in UI and the few games I've played (though it struggles because of the lackluster bus speed). USB and FireWire also work great (with my Iomega FireWire SATA enclosure!).

It should be noted, however, that you install this at your own risk. Classic Mac OS can be finicky, and while this is stable for me, it may well not be stable for you. You'll need Stuffit Expander also, but that comes preinstalled with 8.x so you should be fine (should be in your Internet > Aladdin folder.)

I did this for 8.6 with the Radeon 7000 drivers way back when. IIRC, the R7000 came out after OS 9 was out, so they never had "official" support for 8.6 and earlier, but it largely worked just fine. It just wasn't "officially" supported.

9.x is just 8.6 but with OS X junk. Click to expand...

That's ... a bit of an oversimplification. For 9.0 and 9.0.4 that was probably true (especially if you consider CarbonLib "OS X junk"), but 9.1 is actually technically different under the hood (requires an MMU, for one thing, which is why SheepShaver can't run it). It would be more accurate to say 9.2 is just 9.x with OS X junk, since most of the changes there were indeed related to Classic support.

With respect to extension and CDEV compatibility, though, yes, there wasn't a whole lot of difference which is why this works.