SGI: Hardware

So I fired up the Indigo 2 this evening and because I temporarily misplaced the SGI mouse I plugged in a generic PS/2 mouse. When this didn't work I then found the SGI mouse and it worked briefly but now I'm not getting any response, even after a couple of cold boots.

Have I done something stupid? I assumed the SGI mouse was PS/2 compatible but maybe that is my bad?

Any help gratefully appreciated!

Cheers, Mark.

Indigo2, Indy and newer (with the exception of Onyx1/CHALLENGE) use standard PS/2 peripherals. The only gotcha is temporary and keyboard-related - SGI doesn't use the common codepage, so some keyboards don't work if they don't support all three.

Your mouse issue is either not related or related to plugging it into the wrong port (KB and M are not symmetric).

OK, so it is the Indigo *not* the Indigo 2 that needs specific hardware. The Indigo 2 uses standard PS/2 peripherals.

Phew, so I think this is a classic case (as I had with the Fuel) where IRIX attempts to auto-configure to the new hardware.

I ran the command

# systune pcmouse_mode 0

as recommended here: https://sites.google.com/site/martinsguistuff/home/unix-based/using-a-scroll-wheel-mouse-in-irix-6-5 and even though it reported it was set to mode 0 already I confirmed this. The mouse still didn't respond, but when I ran the command

# mouse

it suddenly started responding again. After a reboot it is still working.

However, as I was typing in WordPerfect 6.0 the power died. It has rebooted again, so I don't know whether this is a symptom of overheating, for example.

Yep, looks like the power supply is cutting out, joy, I guess it was only a matter of time...

Power supplies are like major league baseball player's legs; the first to go...

Has anyone attempted to hack together a franken-power supply using a commodity PC power supply? I have done this in the past with other vintage computers and quite frankly don't miss the lottery every time you hit the power switch one little bit!

Is there anything about the Indigo 2 power supply specification that would make this a non-starter? In the meantime I'm going to do the PSU capacitor replacement, as detailed here: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2psu.html

+3.3V on the IMPACT models is probably significantly more oomphy than most modern PC PSUs (where +12V is used with local VRMs to supply lower voltages).

Most of the time it's dried-out caps. Try going through and replacing them. I think there's even a thread on here about the most likely candidates.