I fired up Console and it says my video card is too old. Never have I had it say that

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try booting in verbose mode and you may see that message again. It isn't that your card is too old, it just might be too old for things like quartz extreme or core image. These both will flag this message when trying to boot. I get it every time I boot my Lombard =)

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Yeah does the same for my Pismo.

If it works in safe mode then you might consider target-disking it to another machine and re-applying the 10.3.9 combined update from that machine to the Pismo. Doing so for 10.4.9/10/11 has solved several issues for me in the past, and might work for you in this case.