So the Airport Exreme card is based on the Broadcom "43" chipset. Linux has several drivers for this, depending on the exact model, firmware revision, etc.
see:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xxNow obviously the closed-source "blob" driver is of no interest, since it is supplied in x86 compiled form.
But, all the other sources listed on that page for drivers ... come with full open source, source code!
I think driver development seems daunting, I am sure it is, in fact. However, for the most part, the hardware on these chips has all the "hard stuff" happening on-chip and the driver just needs to communicate to the chipset what needs to be done.
I have a few hardware-developing friends that might be able to help with advice, though they don't know about OS 9 specifically.
As well, there is the RALink USB , PCI and PCMCIA card chipset, mentioned here
https://ask.metafilter.com/21267/Know-of-a-cheap-USB-Wifi-dongle-for-Mac-OS-9 with open-source drivers for Linux and OS X.
Here's all the Linux related open source driver info
https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/driversSo, question is, is it worth it to see if Airport Extreme could be supported?
Another question might be, "if a tiny USB device were an option, would that be as good or better (since it could work on desktops and notebooks and work on anything with working USB)?"
I am no guru, just wondering if we could have a productive discussion around this and if there are any device-driver writers in need of employment.
Let's brainstorm:
-- could modify driver to give full Airport Extreme support
-- could we fund a bounty for an open source driver for MacOS 9, once we found a qualified device driver writer and determined what we wanted to support?
-- could we find a way to automate the porting of Linux device drivers (they are written to a sort of standard API) into MacOS 9?
Ideas and comments welcome!!! Let's get this show on the road
and make it funky