Cute little find at a Junk Store

Heheh, you know it. Fanciest looking floppies discs I've ever seen.

 

LOL, I called the number and I asked "is this for N64 workstations", the woman said "hold on, let me get you to our service desk". LOL. I hung up tho.

 

lol...

 

XD

 

Hiya,

I actually run a lot of SGI gear. If they are indeed R5000 Cyclone Indy's .. you're extremely lucky. The prom and the cpu (won't work without the correct prom) is the hard bit to find. Ram is easy. 72pin ECC (36bit) FPM. Can take upto 256mb. O/S wise you can run upto 6.5.24 on them or various opensource O/S's. They're actually 64bit, but IRIX (SGI's O/S) won't run in 64bit mode on them but NetBSD can.

Anyway.. very very lucky to find two R5k's. Hope they work. It'd cost you about 50$ to get ram for them on EBAY. Modern software is available on nekochan and tcgware depending if you stay with 5.3 or 6.5.24.

There's also some sgi channels on irc if you get stuck. If you can't find a hard disk.. I'd recommend either of two options, firstly either a SCSI2SD adapter (works fine.. just becareful of swap chewing flash cycles), or complete root on NFS.

Good luck!

Give me a bell if you're interested in bringing these things up one day.

Cheers,
73.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical

There's also magneto-optical disk but I don't think the drive could read regular floppy disks.

 

A 13w3 -> VGA with a 75Hz monitor should do what you need, at least it did for my Sun Ultra 5

 

As Jack said, it's easy to convert, but be careful, not all Sun 13w3 <-> vga dsub 15's are created equal. Some LCD's simply don't like the modes and you can do some pretty impressive modes with them that modern screens have trouble with. I've got an Octane2 I use.. even at 1024x768 and 1280x1024, two of my five LCD's simply won't display anything. So less on is don't hesitate to try random LCD's.

This is less of an issue in this day and age because LCD screens which most people have don't care about the SOG (sync on green) signal and ignore it.

Check this bloke out:
http://phaq.phunsites.net/2006/08/25/using-a-sun-13w3-vga-adaptor-on-a-sgi-indy/

You can also easily make your own. Check out the Nekochan forums. It's quite SGI centric,

SGI did produce an LCD for the O2 and x86 320 series workstations. They're not stupidly expensive though are getting rarer. They're period, branded, work well and look trendy++ so they're marginally more woman friendly. Keyboard and mouse.. your in luck, it's PS/2,

Also I'm uridium on IRC@oz.org .. there's a nice VMS/Unix/Retro Computer channel there called #sgi with still a few SGI fans in it

but.. these things you have can be made up to be very decent little workstations, especially if you are into the whole Retro UNIX-BattleStation movement.

If you're struggling for SCSI disks, don't stress. There's a plenty of options. You can even get a small 200mb or bigger disk, use it for swap and run the entire O/S off nfs from a Linux or BSD box in a pinch. There's also more modern disks on wide<->narrow converters and retarded back to narrow/se .. there's the SCSI2SD's which I mentioned (just don't swap to them) and ...rah rah etc.

There's also a lot of rather nifty graphics options for these things. XL8 (GR8/Newport), XL24, XZ, then there's the TV and broadcast out Galleleo's with cosmo compress add-ons, wide hvd scsi from the challenge-S, 10/100 Phobos cards (hard to find) .. all sorts of options.

Go easy.

Al

 

Thanks for all the info! I'll give it a shot!

 

Keen to hear how it goes.

 

A lot of high end CRT computer monitors support sync on green, I think. My monitor, which is a 20" LaCie (but it's actually made by Mitsubishi) supports sync on green, though I've never tried it.

 

She probably thought you were prank calling her. Some people get a kick out of it, others don't.

 

The boards for n64dev that you feed to an XL24 Indy are called "Ultra64".

Not all SoG CRT's are created equal. Some are more equal than others.. and some just have very stupid ideas of what modes they should be doing with which signal pulse rates.