ATI Rage Orion crashes Power Mac 6400 and 6500 models

After installing a Rage Orion card in his Power Mac 6400, Geoff Wiley began getting system crashes at startup. Another reader reported a similar crash. Geoff contacted ATI, and they replied:

"After installing a Rage Orion and the ATI 4.0 software on a PowerMac 6400 or 6500 system, the system may hang when booting or boot to a black screen. ATI Software Engineering has been advised of the above issue and is investigating."

J.W. Baker adds: "The problem seems to stem from the ATI Graphics Accelerator extension associated with 2D acceleration - this is the point where it hangs or crashes each time." However, Sean Smith replies: "While disabling the ATI Graphics Accelerator will allow the Power Mac 6500 to start up, any calls to RAVE or OpenGL will hang the Mac. (This is with Mac OS 8.6, QuickDraw 3D 1.6, OpenGL 1.0, and ATI Rage 128 3D Accelerator 5.3.9--all current versions.)"