Hello good people of OS9,
I have a little personal project I want to attempt porting to OS9 (and maybe OS8). However I'm unclear on what advanced drawing features I can rely upon, if any. First I was hopeful maybe Quartz was backported via CarbonLib, but I eventually found some Apple document explicitly stating "no".
Then I was really excited to stumble upon QuickDraw GX - wow, perfect! - but then saddened as I read it was killed off around OS8/8.6. There's apparently a GX extension that can be used after that, but I'm unclear on whether that's viable for OS9. Something about compatibility issues with various apps?
So am I understanding all this right? Are there any 3rd party libraries that can pick up the slack? Specifically I'm looking for things like curves, masking, matrix transforms, font outline rendering, etc. I'm planning on using the PowerPlant framework if that matters.