Hardware For Sale/Trade

Krokodil wrote: Is it actually possible to fix the things? You could make some good money if you did.

Yes, I had some success least year .

The whole procedure is not for the faint of heart. It is also very labor intensive so it would almost certainly cost more than most hobbyists are willing to pay.

Unfortunately.
Things in electronics are not cheap, especially the equipment
e.g. the LCR meter I am still looking for (second hand? I hope).
It's damn useful, it's damn expensive

30 mins in an 80 deg C oven is what the XBox RROD folks do
Not saying do it, just saying.

Besides which Mashek has had 4 MaxImpacts for sale for quite a while now.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SGI-Silicon-G ... 19fefe576a
I bought 2. There is still one left. Works out for me at about £200+ a bit each including shipping and import fees.
Not sure if I still have to pay VAT (fsck you UK government) but hey, that's well below UK asking prices.

eh, it's the 22% of the declared value, here, in italy

I don't aim them at hobbyists. I currently act as support for a couple of airforce training setups where they're still used.

Pity it isn't possible to respin the tech in a modern shrunk process, stick it on a single chip card (but with the same I/O ports), allow
for Max + many options. Oh well.

Ian.

There's still one left... still... not understanding this...at that price... you're quoting £1495 mapes
WhyTF has nobody bought it ?

You know what... fsckit I bought it

See previous post. Why should I sell something cheaply when I don't have to ? All that happens is
that dealers buy the items and sell them on for a huge markup; this occured with R10K boards for Onyx,
dealers bought a bunch from me because my price was low (yet high from a hobbyist viewpoint), I found
out they were being sold on for a +1K markup.

Really wish hobbyists would get a grip on the reality of the tech they're meddling with. I mean jeez,
the 'main' dealers sell this stuff for oodles more than I do much of the time, whereas I'm lucky if I break
even each month. I hardly ever sell Max sets, and they're hard to obtain. The notion of what something
is worth has absolutely nothing to do with whatever anyone wishes something would cost just because
it's old, or based on what they can afford. That's not how supply & demand works, and SGI stuff is a
perfect example of the ebb & flow of the proverbial S&D equation. An item is only ever worth what
someone is willing to pay.

Anyway, I digress. If hobbyists can get a Max set for very little then that's great, but I'm not going to
throw away more than a month's rent just because someone wishes something were cheaper.

Ian.

At Masheks prices a hobbyist should have bought it, but they didn't.
Maybe there are less hobbyists seeing as this tech is 20 years old.
I don't really see any way to get anyone who wasn't part of the wonder of SGI into SGI anymore.
Dwindling market.
Every time I install Irix and have to google for cluesm then tcsh to get autocompletion I wonder why I am doing it.
Then I watch electropaint... and it all comes flooding back.
I don't need a 900Mhz CPU for my Fuel, or a V12, but then again, I couldn't afford or dream of them before.
Now I can. I'm making up for a lost past. I can have something now that cost more than my house.
I can play with something that I wasn't allowed to before or that I couldn't afford before.
I enjoy it frustrating me.
Thank you Silicon Graphics Corp and Irix

mapesdhs wrote: I don't aim them at hobbyists. I currently act as support for a couple of airforce training setups where they're still used.

Pity it isn't possible to respin the tech in a modern shrunk process, stick it on a single chip card (but with the same I/O ports), allow
for Max + many options. Oh well.

Ian.

Well clever though Ian. If ever, one could start with XL24 Newport, the hardware spec was more or less documemted and released for the linux world. It would be great to have even XL24 on a chip. Then ramp up with solid to max, a hell of a task. The other way would be possibly to translate GIO64 to sometihng else eg. PCI, then stick in your 10 years old nvidia ge-force and make a driver for it. The GIO64 spec was also published, but it takes a lot of aspirines to go through, i did n-time tries, but then eventually i gave up and switched on real beer, it has a better taste than the first medicine.

Nyebodnye wrote: Maybe there are less hobbyists seeing as this tech is 20 years old.
I don't really see any way to get anyone who wasn't part of the wonder of SGI into SGI anymore.
Dwindling market.

True, to a fair degree, but prices aren't the issue. Even from Ian, you can pick up systems for a reasonable price, but it depends a lot on what you're wanting. In a nutshell, he sells the stuff with commercial value at commercial prices, and the stuff without this value at hobbyist prices. Yes, it's still more expensive than a lucky dip on eBay, and by some margin, but you do know exactly what you're buying and get a tested and fully specced system. The Indigo2 in my signature cost me under £300, and it has had a couple of upgrades since I bought it. Yes, a bit pricey, but I knew what I was getting, I knew all the plastics were in sound condition, and I wasn't asking for a part which has commercial value, such as MaxIMPACT.

Nyebodnye wrote: Maybe there are less hobbyists seeing as this tech is 20 years old.
I don't really see any way to get anyone who wasn't part of the wonder of SGI into SGI anymore.
Dwindling market.

Over the years I've invested tonnes into my love for all sgi stuff, but I'd probably not have bothered with the last few years had I not had the biggest win of my SGI life for £40. To which, I then spent something like approx. £800 to make the system complete-ish. Even this week I've spent £180 on a couple of things, just for this machine alone.. not only does it eat physical money from my pay pal.. but also my electricity.. but it also keeps me warm in these winter evenings. I come home at night, sit in my super lab, flick 50 switches and I'm surrounded by 1990.. and then I say at the end of the night, "I'll be up in a minute", I then type the shutdown command a zillion times and 20 minutes later I'm in bed.
It's an expensive hobby at times, but then so is restoring cars or ham radio and I can't complain, each night I turn my children on and fuck around with something so pointless yet so amazingly expensive and probably stuff you could get on a PI but I may one day become good at it.

Sometimes I also turn them on and they miss-behave.. on those night I generally whinge to you guys and relegate them to the loft!

But you're right, I tell the youngsters at work what I did the night before and they look at me behind their WOW mask with glazed eyes as if I'm mad.. Why would anyone start using SGI gear unless the only films they owned were Jurassic park & Disclosure.

If we didn't have SGI.. then we'd be all be on another forum I suppose.. but maybe it would be cheaper.

Trippynet wrote: ... he sells the stuff with commercial value at commercial prices, ...

Usually somewhere inbetween. Often I've discovered too late that I've been selling some items way too cheaply, eg. one time various dealers were buying quad-195MHz IP25 boards from me and then selling them on with a 4X markup. Weird thing is, if I price some things too low, companies won't buy them (raises too many questions within internal purchasing).

I suppose the only real exceptions to the usual pricing scale are Extreme Indigo2s (still little demand for those) and my mod-CPU R12K/300 O2 which is set a lot cheaper than an O2 with an original R12K/300. Irony is, I do these so hobbyists can get a good spec & condition O2 for a decent price, but one US hospital decided to buy five of the mod CPUs! Still wish I could work out the resistor positions for 350MHz though, bound to be a few 300 modules that could handle it ok (I already fit a better fan by default).

Ian.

mapesdhs wrote: Pity it isn't possible to respin the tech in a modern shrunk process, stick it on a single chip card (but with the same I/O ports), allow
for Max + many options. Oh well.

off course possible but it costs human resources, the time is one of them. Developing things in fpga takes time to debug them, a lot of time, and the hardware takes more times and money.

e.g. we (a friend of mine and I) have been developing a MIPS3 softcore for 4 years, it is working, but ... it needs more effort to be "validated". I can, in the theory, synthesize the whole MIPS cpu, adding an FPU, adding peripherals, and then I might build a "system on chip" able to run "nuttx" (similar to linux but real time OS), or I can quote the OpenMIPS project and their new RISC ecosystem, but ... that RISC soft core can obtain some 150 MIPS in a Cyclone V FPGA, while the SoC version (hard CPU core, ASIC) achieves some 4000 MIPS. That's a pretty good FPGA vs. ASIC speed illustration. It makes sense when you have custom tasks, and a customer that refunds your effort.

Hobby is completely different, and practically .... it requires organization, motivation, specialization, e.g. someone has to do testbench and it's a boring activity, nobody wants for her/his hobby

cybercow wrote: The other way would be possibly to translate GIO64 to something else

possible, but difficult, e.g. the RiscPC has a simpler bus than GIO32 (indy) and GIO64 (indigo2), it has a cheap connector, better signal integrity constraints (also because slower), but it required a lot of effort (and money) in order to interface the AGP bus. The final kit is still listed at 300 euro (with a 32Mbyte AGP card, only a few models are supported, and they must be flashed), just to plug-in a 30 euro AGP card. PCBs are expensive when the request is not in term of thousand of units, and on the software side it was difficult too, and we have sources about RiscOS (OpenRiscOS, v5/v6), while Irix is closed, it means reversing, which implies more effort, more motivation, …

uunix wrote: and probably stuff you could get on a PI

In an imaginary " celebrity deathmatch " in computer science, computer against computer, Risc PC/700 against Raspberry PI
they both run RiscOS , but the PI wins 1:10, it's 10 times faster, and it costs 1:10

but … the PI misses the voodoo inside the Gemini chip inside the Guest PC Card
so, the fastDOSbox (~dosBox) can't compete with the magic of " !PC/Pro "

Speed isn't everything.. a Commodore 64 could crush the fsck out a PIE !

(ivelegacy, quoting error there, it was cybercow who commented about GIO64 translation, not me)

(fixed, my mistake with copy & paste, sorry)

mapesdhs wrote: I don't aim them at hobbyists. I currently act as support for a couple of airforce training setups where they're still used.

Pity it isn't possible to respin the tech in a modern shrunk process, stick it on a single chip card (but with the same I/O ports), allow
for Max + many options. Oh well.

Ian.

Would it be possible to make TRAM module replacements that are more durable and run cooler? I always wondered about that.

You mean replace the stock heat sink mechanism with something else? Problem is, how to do that without using up too much space, which is very limited. If a system has a Max set and nothing else than one could use the upper slot to fit some kind of dual-fan blower asy, but replacing the TRAM heatsinks, not so sure...