Dear Lazyweb, Some time at the end of the nineteen hundreds, I took the Indy and O2 that I had liberated from Netscape and retired them to a shelf in my laundry room. They worked fine at the time that I did that! Now, not so much. Neither boots.
I got an OSSC that lets the Indy display to a modern HDMI monitor (earlier attempts with other scan converters had failed) but the Indy says no SCSI drive, no keyboard (even with a 90s-vintage PS2 keyboard). So probably the drive is bad, but I can't even get into the recovery system. And I also don't have a spare SCSI drive, or a boot floppy, or restore media, or a SCSI CD drive to put that in.
As for the O2, it appears to maybe be putting out VGA sync, but the screen is black. Possibly I don't have the OSSC configured right. It does have a CD drive, which may or may not work. Initially it was playing the adorable boot song, but then I re-seated everything and now it doesn't play the song and the LED stays red. So I guess I blew away some load-bearing dust.
I would like to believe that these classic machines are not just paperweights now. Any suggestions on how to rehabilitate them?
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
The standard dull answer you'll probably get from every doughy neckbeard out there is "Replace shorted or leaky capacitors (particularly in the power supply), and try a BlueSCSI in place of the drive to see if you can get the solid state parts to boot."
Turns out a lot of "solid state" electronics was little cans of acid.
Any suggestion that begins with "do some speculative surface-mount soldering" might as well just say "throw it in the trash".
Yeah except the surface-mount stuff isn't the risky stuff. Usually it's tantalums near the power rails that shorted out, for this era of machine.
If it works, sits for over a decade, then doesn’t work, it’s the capacitors. Or mice! You can probably find someone to recap these for a couple pizzas.
I will never, ever, ever stop being amazed at how many nerds think you can just get randos to come over do shit for free. What world do you live in??
If it were that easy, my various arcade games would be functional more than half of the year.
Pizzas or equivalent tender
I do live in a world where that happens though. Can think of four people who would be sufficiently interested to try it, should I wave around a piece of retro computing gear with history. I think this from spending too much time online and in weird conferences.
Ok, well, good for you, but in my not-inconsiderable number of years, the number of times that trick has worked is pretty close to zero. And for many years my actual full-time paid job was basically: "convince randos to do shit for free". There's a lot of daylight between "I know four people who could do this" and "one of them is gonna come over to your house". Because the funny thing about competent people with skills is, they have shit to do.
Haha.. jwz's lazyweb is always good for something. :)
I'm umpteen thousand miles from my indy at the moment, else I'd have a look at my config for you, I remember having a similar problem. Hope you get a more useful answer or can wait three weeks until I can provide a better one.
There are these modern SD card devices which provide a SCSI interface. https://store.rabbitholecomputing.com/ZuluSCSI-V1-2-p/zuluscsi-v1.2-rev-2023c.htm?1=1&CartID=0
Hopefully something like that will help you get it up and running easier than sourcing older drives?
Not only are there SD card devices but you can even find SCSI SSDs with decent enough performance.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/scsi-isnt-dead-yet-new-ssd-for-old-or-obsolete-systems-is-a-boon-for-retro-computing-fans
I seem to recall someone had a way to serve up disk images as a connected drive using a clever (hacky) bit of circuitry, but I can no longer find that. Perhaps someone remembers that?
Maybe @flexion could give you some pointers.
re: VGA sync, is it doing Sync-on-Green (SoG)?
The Indy is sync on green for sure (and working). Not sure about the O2. I seem to recall it was differently-weird in some way.
I can confirm the O2 to be sync on green.
This is not based on experience with these machines but it is based on experience with too much ancient electronics. For the machine that was making trying-to-boot noises but now is not, it may be worth repeatedly reseating stuff, trying between each iteration: it's likely there are really marginal connections which just need enough frobbing to scrub the crud off them. However most of my experience was with machines quite a lot older than these (80s) and it is all now old: eventually I lost the will to keep moving things like fuji eagles around.
And of course you will have tried this.
Try first reseating RAMs, CPUs and the motherboard. When my first O2 arrived, I had to do that, and it worked fine. If nothing changes, hook a serial console and check the output for errors.
Another point of failure is the RTC Dallas chip battery, you can get a replacement from Glitchworks.
Also, check PSUs voltages if they're in spec.
For more informations, you can ask to the SGUG.
I have 6.5.22f media, including a custom hack of the bootable media that has the http modules inserted into the rootimage to allow it to use HTTP services, AND a full inst install script for an Indy (SGI Indy running 6.5.22f USED to be my mail server). If you need, I can hook you up. It would be an honor and a privilege!
Does the drive spin up? It'll probably stick after sitting for half a century. If it spins, it may just be wrongly terminated. Can't remember now how it worked on the Indy, but I seem to recall having a SCSI terminator on the rear, so without that end of the bus was open. Maybe.
PS/2 keyboard usually worked fine, or even cheap PS/2-USB converters. You can also hook up a serial console on port 1, but it's some dumb round Apple plug that's probably hard to find now. Stick in pins!
"dumb round Apple plug"? Someone's cranky. Apple didn't invent that connector, it was a standard 8-pin mini-DIN. DIN stands for Deutsche Institut Normal, a German standards body that was seemingly fond of round connectors.
It is extremely easy to find, too. You can buy new mini-DIN-8 serial cables and converters online from the usual sources.
Yes, the drive makes noise, and the cable is plugged in correctly. I have no idea why the PS2 keyboard is not being recognized, since it's the same keyboard I used to use with this machine.
I wonder if foone knows about these...
foone is a treasure.
my Indigo² once stopped recognizing its keyboard. Tracing from the i8042 microcontroller responsible for PS/2 protocol, the pinout of which is standardized in this role, showed that its clock and data pins ended up at a 74ALS32, where they're buffered and sent out the PS/2 ports, and back from there. Probing there confirmed the signals to be dead. Replaced that and it lived. The Indy is a cut-down I² so same should apply, except parts are reshuffled and not everyone is up for SMD rework.
I tried a *different* 90s-vintage keyboard, and it recognizes that one! So I guess something is actually wrong with the other one. I also tried a couple of USB female to PS/2 male adapters that claimed to make modern keyboards and mice work, and they do not.
yeah, the keyboard has to have the smarts to switch. Of my pile of ewaste, only one keyboard and two mice work with the adapter. Good that's sorted though!
Old keyboards do eventually die. The last of my vintage PS/2 keyboards died a few years ago, while still in active use. I had to buy a keyboard for the first time since the 1990's.
Once upon a time_t I had to pull out and push back the motherboard of my O₂.
I messed around with an Indy for a bit a few years ago.
It's possible to install the OS from a Linux machine over a network cable/LAN connection without having to get a working SGI-compatible CD drive.
see: https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/howto-irix-network-install-using-ubuntu.109/
I can't think of something that would cause the keyboard itself to stop working, short of corrosion from humidity? cable getting nibbled by a cat? IDK. Finding another system with a PS/2 port to test the keyboard on might be tricky, probably easier to just buy/borrow another, known working generic PS/2 keyboard and try that.
I know nothing about O2, but this forum might be the place to ask questions:
https://forums.irixnet.org/forum-11.html
The O2 is Sync on Green too iirc. Hope you unplugged the power cord before removing the mobo, or it would kill it. For the Indy I would try a ZuluSCSI. If you can get them to work, reinstall IRIX over network by netbooting into the 'LOVE' installer (or use Reanimator): https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-3819.html
Also, the OSSC has like, bad overscan or something. The whole screen image is shifted an inch to the left and cropped off. If anyone can tell me what to adjust in OSSC that would be great.
So it sounds like my options for the Indy are:
And my options for the O2 are:
There's a VM Image called "DINA" that will (used to?) work as a properly configured IRIX install server.
There's also a ARCS PROM environment variable that tells those machines to boot successfully with the main console on the serial port rather than throwing an error if the graphical console doesn't come up.
...so if you can get to the PROM then perhaps you can get it to boot in headless mode and use a remote telnet/ssh/X session?
Good luck with recovering those HDDs tho'. It sounds like it's going to be hard work and not very fruitful without them.
You can use Sampling options->advanced timing on the OSSC to finetune the picture. You usually start with "active pixels" and then adjust the other parameters until it fits, but the SGIs make this easy by providing all the needed parameters in "display properties"
This https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/scsi-isnt-dead-yet-new-ssd-for-old-or-obsolete-systems-is-a-boon-for-retro-computing-fans seems promising.
Now I realized duplicate post.
Didn’t some SGIs have this weird thing where they wouldn’t boot h less the camera was connected? There’s an eeprom setting to fix that but by default they would halt if it was missing or something.
I never encountered that with the camera. But it might have been the case that without an EEPROM setting, they wouldn't boot without a keyboard. It's been so long that I don't remember.
I feel like this post needed one of those “don’t reply unless you’ve actually done this before”. Ignore recapping suggestions: the caps that blow in the Indy are big and smelly and kill the machine. The drive in the Indy is almost certainly dead and not worth fussing with unless it contains something you want. Replace it with flash you can remove, so you can read and write the whole thing as a block device on some other computer.
Ignore BlueSCSI suggestions: while very neat for decades-older vintage machines, their bit-banging SCSI approach is too slow to run IRIX. You need the more expensive, more complicated SCSI2SD or ZuluSCSI devices, which suck more but are faster.
The input problem is a mix of two things, both common and not your fault. The first is that the Indy’s keyboard interface is quirky and much fussier than an actual PS/2. Unless it’s an SGI-branded “granite” keyboard, it’s more likely your $20 PS/2 keyboard has slowly degraded until it’s just out of spec than the $50 well-designed and buffered Indy I/O interface having failed.
The second problem is that the IP22 hardware (including the Indy) has a firmware setting that stalls the boot if there’s no console attached. They were sold in parallel as the “Challenge S” server and need to be configured differently to boot “headless”. If your keyboard used to work, then this wouldn’t have been a problem before now.
The least hassle fix is to buy a secondhand SGI “granite”, but the half-smart vintage keyboard crowd have made those comically expensive now. The second-least hassle fix is to buy a dozen PS/2 keyboards from a Goodwill or ebay or whatever, and throw away the 11 that don’t work.
There is some historical reason why it’s better not to configure an Indy to boot headless all the time, but I can’t remember what it is. It may slow down the boot or something, so this wasn’t an obvious act of dumb configuration.
If your enthusiasm stretches to installing a SCSI2SD or ZuluSCSI, I can post you an IRIX install* on a flash card. Doing installs from CD media is hard work in the modern era because you also need a SCSI CD-ROM drive that supports non-standard block sizes.
* Absolutely, definitely not back-doored, said the Random Internet Person.
I have no clever advice about the O2 because thankfully mine still lives, and the O2 uses more modern SCSI disks that are still readily available. I’ve rebuilt several Indy machines, though.
I remember having to deal with a similar problem with a PC in the mid 90s. The problem was the hard drive disks appeared to have seized. Removing the drive itself and manually spinning it with your wrist worked to free the disks and/or heads and the PC booted up. It appears that maybe more things are wrong here then the SCSI disks, but if you find the disks are not spinning up, maybe this suggestion can help.
Ah, stiction; it’s been a long time. Did SGI ever share a recommended lift-and-drop height for unsticking it’s hard drives, or was that just IBM?
Not sure if you want to trust this piece of history to a stranger, but Adrian Black of Adrian's Digital Basement on Youtube is in Portland, Oregon, which isn't THAT far away from you, and I think he'd at least be willing to offer guidance if not to actually get the whole system working for you. This is exactly the sort of thing he deals with on his channel, and he seems to have a good reputation in the retrocomputing community.