BeOS on a lot of the PCI PowerMacs is actually pretty awesome. I had BeOS R5 on both my 7300/200 and 6500/250 for a time, and it was pretty much completely compatible with all of the hardware, and even gave you some pretty good control over how sound was output from the machine, letting you control the sub volume as well as keeping the internal speaker enabled and putting things out to the various audio jacks.
As I recall, BeOS R5 also worked well with the tv and a/v inputs on the 6500, if yours has that system installed, mine did not so I never verified this.
It was said of BeOS (or maybe this was NeXT) that they'd either be the first to fail or the last to make it... and it's sort of unfortunate, with that in mind, that BeOS didn't make it. It really does embody what would have been great to have in a modern deskto operating system for consumers and other standalone stations, and just a little bit more deployment of some of the UNIX and multiuser concepts (they were soooo close already) would have made it a formidable competitor with NeXT/OSX as well as Windows NT and the traditional UNIX set. It was extremely efficient at using multiple processors, and it has made some very old hardware feel new, at least to me. It's... just a little tiny bit shameful how much faster and stable BeOS and its apps are on some hardware than the period-appropriate Windows or Mac OS often is. If only it'd gotten apps from some of the major developers.
As I recall, BeOS R5 also worked well with the tv and a/v inputs on the 6500, if yours has that system installed, mine did not so I never verified this.
It was said of BeOS (or maybe this was NeXT) that they'd either be the first to fail or the last to make it... and it's sort of unfortunate, with that in mind, that BeOS didn't make it. It really does embody what would have been great to have in a modern deskto operating system for consumers and other standalone stations, and just a little bit more deployment of some of the UNIX and multiuser concepts (they were soooo close already) would have made it a formidable competitor with NeXT/OSX as well as Windows NT and the traditional UNIX set. It was extremely efficient at using multiple processors, and it has made some very old hardware feel new, at least to me. It's... just a little tiny bit shameful how much faster and stable BeOS and its apps are on some hardware than the period-appropriate Windows or Mac OS often is. If only it'd gotten apps from some of the major developers.