N64 + 64DD TapeDrives pre-release Software (DDS Tapes) [need help]

Do you have an Indy?

 

Yeah, 2 R5000 Indys.. fun "little" machines.

 

Indeed they are. I upped mines from R4300 to R5000 and a whoppy 128 MB of ram (or was it 64 MB). That's what I call real iron

 

It's a very extensive and interesting recap, Zant.
However, only three of the six tapes had actually content. The others were empty as far as I remember.
Of course there is the possibility that I still missed something; but iirc correctly, I tried even ffw the tapes to see if someone just erased the first blocks, without finding anything.

EDIT : this forum is not nearly as efficient as it used to be! (=my quoting failed).

 

Glad to see progress picking up on this, good luck vinyl.

kammedo, what tapes did you have out of curiousity? Did any of them read "64DD Prerelease" on it? Maybe what you have/had is important, and maybe it could help in finding out what is on vinyl's tapes.

 

So I have got it. (finally) a machine that has a tape drive. and all the equipment I needed Thanks to AwesomeRetro/Hack42 in the Netherlands (Location Awesomespace)

Only thing I need is the IRIX software
anyone who can help me with this? I can burn it on CD or USB

Also on one of the tapes it say 970924 someone said "must be a japanese date" so I think his right 24 - 09 - 1997 makes sense

 

I would suggest learning the tar command and switches and doing some tests with some "other" tapes first. Do both read and write to the drive to test the drive out before attempting anything with your tapes.
I believe anything tar'd in irix would untar on FreeBSD just fine.

 

Yes I confirm I had both 64DD pre-release as well as RCP 1.0 software.

Now, a few things :
A) I am pretty sure I have the files somewhere; my main issue (once I find them) is to release them or not. It is, in endresult,
still proprietary Software (even if outdated). I'd like to have other's opinions on this (releasing them or not); that way, once I find these files, I will be more confident to just dump them somewhere and that's it.

B) Let it be completely clear : I am not in a race with you guys working on a new dump; I believe the tapes should be re-dumped for cross-reference to make sure everything that is there actually got dumped. As mentioned, most of the tapes I had were empty, which is suspicious (but not unlikely), so a second, more precise dumping attempt is more than welcomed IMO.

C) For the tar'ing, I recall that tar on sgi irix is some "special"/older version of the command; I strongly suggest untar'ing on the Indy (which has the correct version).


D) For the IRIX version, pick 5.3 i'd say

 

Has your Indy got a CD-ROM drive? And is it an original one? SGIs can be extremely picky about which CD-ROM drives they will boot from, and a drive that works fine in a working system might be incompatible with the boot ROM. Note that if this is the case, then you will find out pretty quick, since you won't even be able to boot sash from the CD-ROM.

 

One more note, there is an option to net boot as well, so cdrom is not necessarily required.
Netboot happens over NFS iirc (to a linux box for example),
however you need to tweak the ip stack on the server side; mainly limit nr of accessible ports to 1024 (or 4096, do not remember), plus another thing which unfortunately I do not recall. You might be able to figure it out once you have your setup ready, or perhaps indy owners can help us (or have a look over at www.nekochan.net forums you might find help there).

EDIT : you can check the details at the links below if interested, but here's what's needed on the server side to get netboot up and running :

echo 2048 32767 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc

 

I always found netboot on SGIs to be an immense pain from anything other than another IRIX box, though. In theory all you need is BOOTP and a TFTP server, but in practice it often seemed to get into "I'm going to stop working for some poorly defined reason now".

 

There are some twists at it, yes, iirc it took me a few days to get it right the first time; after that I had my own network in my dormitory room (back then I was still a student) with a desktop Intel, indy sgi, N64 dev setup, lenovo laptop. Oh boy the noise However, if you know exactly what to change (port range, and the additional thing), netboot is quite easy and straightforward.

EDIT : from yours truly : http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?t=16372
(a bit ahead in the discussion) and the site in question with the details on how to properly configure your server's ip stack: http://www.techwood.org/fqa/320.html

 

Useful information - I probably could have got it working, but at the time I had an old R4K Indigo, so I netbooted off that, and it worked first time. It was still painfully slow, due to that lovely 10Mbit/sec half-duplex network port that the Indy has.

 

Whoa I need to read everything a few times before I understood what you guys were saying ^^;

Hate to say this but currently i`m on a holiday. will test when I get back.

 

We've gotten ahead of ourselves - I also incorrectly assumed that vinyl got an Indy. I hope vinyl doesn't mind me mentioning from our PM discussion that it is a Win XP machine being used, not an Indy.

I've never used a tape drive on a Windows machine before. Are there any programs available that can do a one-to-one read of the contents? If they've been tar'ed using a 'special' version of tar, vinyl can upload the dumped contents and someone with an SGI machine can untar them.

 

I forgot to mention that there was a file named isv970924 in the Intelligent Systems FTP backups of 2008 (it is on Prototopia) along with other files with names starting with isv. It looked like some old developer tool but I am not entirely sure what it was. Maybe an earlier version of the tool is on the isv 970924 tape.

 

I must warn you you might have issues with doing things from windows.
I'd rather suggest a Virtualbox + linux setup; that should do the trick (as the tape drive can be mapped to the virtual box anyways).
Pick a linux distro of your choice, and bang!'

 

Thanks to ZANT who hooked my on to a member of Reddit.

I have an appointment with someone this Wednesday who is specialized in dumping tapes like this.
That means by Wednesday we know what are on the tapes! I`ll keep you guys updated!

 

Thanks, vinyl! Looking forward to it.

 

Sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check in on this Wednesday.