ATI suggests that you download the 9.3.1 drivers for the 9600 series (the 9600 is now on legacy support, so little to no new drivers are planned for release, and 9.3.1 is already a bit old). Unfortunately, at least under Win2k3, these drivers do not work with the 9600. Changing almost any setting leads to an immediate crash.
ATI does not maintain a repository of older drivers that I could find, but oldapps.com does, and according to
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/oldapps.com, they haven't added mal-ware to the downloads (though some of their downloads (e-donkey, etc) could be considered malware in their own
right). I tried ATI Catalyst 6.9, released in 2006. The default install set the 'hardware acceleration' (advanced button in display properties) to one stop above zero, which prevented any of the advanced catalyst controls from working, but after setting hardware acceleration to full and rebooting the full set of controls were enabled. The color-correction controls were a bit less advanced than those offered by comparable NVIDIA drivers, however (see screen shot). Most notably missing is the ability to control saturation for the desktop (as opposed to the overlay control, where saturation controls are available). On the other hand, the ATI seemed a bit more saturated than the GForceMX2 two card I replaced, where it was necessary to turn up the saturation in order to get realistic flesh tones. No such adjustment appeared necessary on the 9600.
Next I tried ATI Catalyst 7.9. Here too, I had to set 'hardware acceleration' to full before all the driver features were enabled. This driver did work OK, but didn't add any additional color controls (it did add some more fancy 3D quality settings, however). Disappointingly, however, the video preview stopped working when adjusting overlay color correction. Overlay video still worked fine in other programs however, and looked slightly better color-wise than it had under 6.9, I thought (this was very subjective, however). DxDiag revealed that Direct3d did not work with this driver.
Finally, I tried 8.9. This didn't add any new features, but all the features worked: video preview in the catalyst control center, and dxdiag passed all tests.
