SGI Indigo2 IMPACT questions...

[Jules Richardson]

On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 21:37 +0200, Jochen Kunz wrote:
> On Sat, 21 May 2005 18:50:12 +0000
> Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > How to I tell what IMPACT video board it has? (Other than powering it
> > up I suppose, but I'm going to be giving it a good clean inside
> > first...)
> IIRC: Solid IMAPCT is one board, High IMPACT (== Solid IMAPCT with
> texture memory) are two boards and MAX IMAPCT (== High IMPACT with twice
> as much Geometry Engines and Raster Managers) are three boards.

Rats, just a standard Solid IMPACT then. Still, it's still the fastest
SGI we've got at present...

> Power up machine, abort boot (press ESC or click with mouse), go to the
> cammand prompt (press 5 or click Icon) and type the command "hinv". This
> will give you a Hardware INVentory.

Yep... gotta wait for various bits to dry out for a few days first
before I can do that though :)  The machine was half full of dust, so
I've stripped it and dusted off some bits / washed others. 

> > Anyone have the SCSI connector pinouts? The machine has no drive
> > sleds,
> GOTO ePay
> GET( "DriveSleds")

Yes, I did wonder... :/  I *could* scavenge some old SCA connectors from
dead SCA drives though and build some sort of adapter. Or, better still,
replace the whole internal bus with a normal cable and power sockets - I
just need pinouts of the system board SCSI connector then...

> If this fails use an external disk / CDROM / ...
> BTW: Internal and external SCSI bus are two independent busses with
> separte host adapters.

Ahh, I had thought about that. I wasn't sure if it was dual channel -
and if it was, whether it'd boot from a device on the second channel
(mind you I suppose it has to in order to boot from an external CDROM).
Still, that's probably the way to go at least to see if it all works...

> > Any special flavour of memory the machine needs?
> PS/2 FPM parity SIMMs, four per bank, max. 768 MB RAM total. (1 GB with
> tricks)

Aha ok. I think the biggest SIMMS I have are 16MB, but not sure if
they're parity. Still, there are a bazillion SIMM sockets on the board
so even if I just fill it out with 4MB modules or something that'd still
be enough for starters :)

> There where IRIX media specialized for certain platforms but this is
> written on the installation media. If the is nothing written on the
> media you can expect that they support all platforms that the given
> release supported. Try to get IRIX 6.5.20m. This is the latest version
> that officially supports this machine.

Can't remember what I've got now TBH. I don't think it's as recent as
6.5.x though - likely it's 5.3 (I've used it to install on both Indys
and Indigos so it's certainly multi-platform... whether that's too old
to work with the Indigo2 though is another matter...)

> BTW: I am typing this on an Indigo2 R10k Solid IMPACT. :-)

Heh... nice machines by the sounds of it. Certainly the good ol' Indy's
still pretty capable, so an Indigo2 can't really be any worse :)

cheers

Jules