The collected works of halfmanhalftaco

Looking for the teal plastic feet/stands and/or the cdrom sled with or without a compatible CDROM drive for an Indigo2.

Thanks!

Sorry about the confusion, I updated the post to say sled instead of tray. I'm definitely looking for the proprietary sled with the 80-pin backplane connector. I'd generally call the thing that you put a CD in to a older cdrom drive a "caddy" and not a tray.

Hey guys, thought I'd drop this here as some folks here may find it useful as an alternative to DINA - my IRIX netbooter called 'irixboot':

https://github.com/halfmanhalftaco/irixboot

It uses Virtualbox and Vagrant to launch a disposable VM for netbooting IRIX installs - including extracting EFS disc images according to a directory structure convention. I've used it to install IRIX versions 5.3 through 6.5.22 on my Indy and Indigo2, and other folks have reported it working on Indigos and Octanes. Probably any other machine that uses the same netboot process will also work.

It's not meant to be long-lived like a DINA VM, but it is quick and gets the job done for one-off OS installs.

It does pretty much everything I need it to do, but I'd welcome any suggestions/pull requests.

So, I picked up an MXI board for relatively cheap but I think one of the two TRAMs is bad on it. It fails IDE in "mg_tram_rev_nobuff", and any GL stuff using hardware textures shows up "interlaced" - see photos for examples.





I've tried reseating the TRAMs and swapping them between the two positions and I get the same failure mode. I ended up just taking them out and have it running in SSI mode, which passes IDE fine.

A couple questions: Is there any fix for this, or do I need to go hunting for a replacement TRAM? Any way to tell which TRAM is bad? I don't have an SI card to swap them into to test them individually.

the IDE tests do not reveal which TRAM is bad, it simply says "tram test failed" and says the whole MXI assembly is bad:



030-0957-003 is the SSI/MXI mainboard, of course. When running IDE without the TRAMs it passes all tests.

I've done some swapping around of the modules to try and isolate the bad one, and I am starting to think that the problem lays with the mainboard itself and not the TRAM modules.

Obviously there are two positions for TRAMs, and the one in the position furthest away from the 13W3 connector always runs significantly hotter than the one closer to the 13W3. This makes me think that the TRAM modules themselves are fine but there is an issue with the other TRAM socket. Sound reasonable?

The board has been pretty significantly factory bodged, presumably to correct for design errors. The bodges don't look to have failed or anything, though. On this photo, it's the socket on the left that runs the TRAM hot, the one on the right does not get very hot.



The TRAMs themselves, both 034-0961-001 models:



I'll have to do a little more fiddling with it to see if there's connector issues and I'll have to take a closer look at the bodges to see if that may be contributing to the problem.

After doing some more experimentation I'm back to thinking one of the TRAMs is indeed bad. I haven't worked out a way to figure out which one is bad (aside from either buying a SI card to see which one doesn't work right in it, or buying another TRAM that is hopefully good).

I think it definitely is one of the two TRAMs though because if you swap the TRAMs to the opposite position, the "interlacing" pattern switches between odd/even lines on display. For instance in the Buttonfly demo it applies a texture to the buttons and the text itself is drawn from textures. I took screenshots between swapping the TRAMs into opposite positions and this is what I get:



zoomed in, split-screen:


I guess another question I have is... can I mix/match SI/SE trams on an MXI? Or do they both have to be the older SI trams to work?