MDD ati pci 9200 and apple adc to dvi, I have questions.

I'm not too sure about the overall answer to your question, but I do have experience with the ATI Radeon 9200 PCI card. As a PCI card and an early one at that, it cannot support some of the most basic OSX video technologies like Quartz Extreme. It does well at 3D acceleration but QE is what makes 2D scrolling and dragging smooth.

So using a 9200 depends on what you want on the monitors attached to it. If all you need to display are static pallets or status screens, you are fine. However, using it to display video or even get fast redraws of previewed still images is probably going to tax the 9200 mightily.

The 9200's development began during the OS9 days but was delayed by the introduction of OSX. It seemed to has gotten stuck between two worlds.

Get 5 MDD's, one for each ADC display, network them all through a gigabit router, control them from one using VNC. An MDD might even be cheaper than one of those DVI to ADC adapters.

You're going to have a wicked bottleneck on those Radeon 9200's.

The PCI slots are only 33 mhz so not much other than the extended desktop wants to be on those displays. In a pinch, the s-video ports on the 9200's will actually do a bang-up job porting to a TV - CRT or an early flatscreen - 640x480 or 800x600 is all you'll want to push - the Mac to TV ATI control panel was/is quite robust and nicely featured for the time.. but that's about it.

For larger resoultion video or games, stick to the displays attached to the AGP cards.

The ADC adapters are ridiculously priced - if you holmes out the info - I found it recently, you can rewire the Apple displays and build a new fanout for power and video and if you're really a busy beaver, a pass-through for the USB.

Here: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=188336 -

ADC pinouts: http://pinouts.ru/Video/apple_adc_pinout.shtml

Deb.

if i'm playing a game on a screen from say a cube (the secondary computer for extended desktop) is it run over the cubes cpu or the MDD?

Mainly on the CPU running the game.

OS X has a built-in VNC server, OS 9 does not, you have to install one, I haven't tried this myself with OS 9.

http://www.testplant.com/products/vine/vine-server/

Teleport is a software KVM switch, it automatically switches your keyboard and mouse to the active machine when you mouse over to that display, but each machine's display is basically local to that machine, if that makes sense. This is not really an extended desktop on the primary machine. This may not be what you originally had in mind.

http://abyssoft.com/software/teleport/

My memory fails me now, I had thought there was a VNC based method to utilize another machine's monitor as an extended desktop for the primary machine, kind of like this iPad app.

http://www.shapeservices.com/en/products/details.php?product=idisplay

I am not able to find a link to that similar kind of set up for OS9/X VNC... anyone else come across that?

But I think this would really only be suitable for non-graphics intensive windows like floating palettes, not 3D interactive games spread across multiple virtual monitors.