The collected works of vishnu - Page 39

What's particularly irksome is that if you call any of these commercial software vendors and ask to buy their IRIX versions they will not sell them to you! Autodesk made a huge mistake when they discontinued the Maya personal learning edition, their 30 day free trial is useless, unless you spend 8 hours a day for that 30 day period you will barely have climbed the learning curve at all. You'd think they'd let people trade 10 year old versions of their software, which they will not sell you no matter how many frogskins you wave in their faces, the big benefit to them would be that people will like the software and want to buy the latest version...

Typo in that IRC convo, the guy's name is Rich Altmaier not Altmier, and it's entirely possible that he wins the longevity award at SGI, having been employed there from 1991 until 2008, here's his linkedin, if anyone knows the guy how about lobbying him to join our humble membership here?

pentium wrote: I just photographed the total bajeesus out of a UCC model 1035 terminal that uses a Selectric II with a fair number of hacks.

There's like 47 photos total that took me all morning to shoot.[/url]

Awesome!

Who's your housekeeper? If I ever uploaded a photo of my computer room somebody'd call the county on me and they'd send over their emergency response team in their radiation suits...

I've had a Traser H3 for at least the last 25 years, not exactly an inexpensive watch but I quite like it:

pentium wrote: I have a housekeeper?

No? How very Felix Unger-ish of you...

That's the problem with SGI's foray into broadcast media, they kicked out all this high end stuff over the period of about two years, and it could do just about anything (for a big big big price), but they had so little success finding customers for it (other than Autodesk, which used it with Smoke/Flame, and NBC used it for the Barcelona Olympics), and none of it was ever properly documented at techpubs, and now the end result is that it's all high-end abandonware...

I work with high voltage for a living, and I've seen a lot of funky HV power supplies, but what the H E double toothpicks is that and wherever did you get it?

Funny I didn't see this when you first posted it, this is a wickedly badass system you've put together!

Have you come up with any nice uses for it? If nothing else it would make a nice Mental Ray render node. Uh, you're not really running OpenBSD on it though, are you?

I remember playing Zork on 5.25 inch floppies back around that same time period...

robespierre wrote:

vishnu wrote: I remember playing Zork on 5.25 inch floppies back around that same time period...

Sure. The disks for the PC weren't really DOS—they were a non-FAT format to stymie piracy (you could make backup disks but there were no "files"). There were some tools on the BBSs of those days to convert the data on Zork disks into regular files and run them.

I remember buying (what I think was) the final release of Zork, it came on multiple disks but it was so long ago I can't even remember if they were 5.25 floppies, 3.5 floppies or CDs. I bought it but I never played it, I think I was too busy playing Descent 1 at the time...

Great post hamei! I wish I could make an equally revelatory comment but sadly I'm finding that

LarBob wrote: how much am I expecting to pay for a replacement anyway..?

There's a 747 watt Cherokee on Ebay right now for eighty five frogskins, seller refurbished with a 30 day warranty, I would say grab it because that's about the lowest price you'll ever see one for on the bay . Do you still need one of the 13W3 -> VGA converters? Sorry that sort of slipped off my to-do list but if you still need one I'll send it ASAP...

Aha! That was the one I bought but never played, Zork Nemesis! Unless I gave it away I probably still have it lying around here somewhere. I never throw out software or computers, I've still got a crapton of 80's PC games on 5.25 floppies (though they're probably degraded and useless by now, can't remember the last time I fired up my PC-AT), including Windmill Software's "Digger" which I played to distraction 30 years ago. The digger.org clone is nice but the timing is wrong on some of the higher levels so using patterns that worked with the original lead to rapid death, and I'm too lazy now to try to figure out any new ones.

I remember how impressed I was the first time I played the original Zork, I was like "holy shit computers really are going to take over the world!" But now, even with all the fury about AI and the dreaded Singularity I'm back to agreeing with Jay McInerney's assertion from Bright Lights, Big City , "hell they couldn't even take Staten Island on a Sunday Morning..."

Yes, if you're good with a soldering iron (and a solder sucker) you can probably fix it. Have you taken it apart yet? Usually the failed part will give up it's identity by having scorched the board around it which alleviates you the necessity of having to blanket-replace parts (caps etc.). So try taking the cover off and get out your magnifying glass...

Very nice, thanks for the effort!

The Maxx Merry-Go-Round going round and round...

LarBob wrote:

vishnu wrote: Yes, if you're good with a soldering iron (and a solder sucker) you can probably fix it. Have you taken it apart yet? Usually the failed part will give up it's identity by having scorched the board around it which alleviates you the necessity of having to blanket-replace parts (caps etc.). So try taking the cover off and get out your magnifying glass...

I took it apart last night and everything looked fine really. Nothing I could see looked scorched and the caps looked fine.

If you've got a voltmeter you could try tracking the input AC to wherever the point of failure might be...

I don't think any of the Octane power supply circuit diagrams ever made it out into the wild, wasted quite a bit of time trying to find one on the gray market...

LarBob wrote:

vishnu wrote: I don't think any of the Octane power supply circuit diagrams ever made it out into the wild, wasted quite a bit of time trying to find one on the gray market...

It's okay lol, thanks. I bought the Cherokee PSU off of eBay, supposed to come Wednesday. Stay tuned I guess...

If nothing else it will get you to the next failure level...

LarBob wrote: I have reseated pretty much everything as far as I know, I even tried a different CPU module to no avail. I can try reseating the memory again.. and also it's not set to reset the prom. I ordered a new PSU and the fans spin and a green light shows on the board, but nothing happens besides that. No output from serial or anything either.

And you're sure you're using a null modem cable on the serial port, right? Set to 9600 baud? A regular RS232 cable won't work. Very odd to have a bad PSU and then two bad CPUs. Now you have to take the whole thing completely apart, including the crossbow, look everything over closely and blow all the dust off. In particular, look the compression connectors over carefully, a couple of wrecked or missing pins could be the culprit...

At my place of employ we use OrCAD, it's great for schematic capture and PCB layout but for circuit sim LT Spice blows the OrCAD version of Spice completely away, and LT Spice is free...

Well that's just typical TRAM misbehavior. Like the wiki page says, they're "expensive and fragile."

LarBob wrote: It should be, yes, and I made sure it was set to 9600 baud. Maybe I can check the connectors again.

What com software are you using? I use minicom on Linux, works great...

LarBob wrote: Okay, I honestly have no idea what to try. I tried reseating the RAM once again to no avail, I'm kind of lost on what else to try. I double checked the prom jumper but it's fine, not sure what to try next at all. The connections on the boards all look fine as well, nothing wrong there as far as I can tell.

If it was bad RAM you'd be getting something at the serial terminal, I fear your tera term isn't reading the Octane's serial output the way it should...

LarBob wrote:

vishnu wrote:

LarBob wrote: Okay, I honestly have no idea what to try. I tried reseating the RAM once again to no avail, I'm kind of lost on what else to try. I double checked the prom jumper but it's fine, not sure what to try next at all. The connections on the boards all look fine as well, nothing wrong there as far as I can tell.

If it was bad RAM you'd be getting something at the serial terminal, I fear your tera term isn't reading the Octane's serial output the way it should...

Okay, I set up minicom on a debian box and get nothing over serial still. I ordered another null modem cable just to be sure and it' s coming Saturday.

The folks that sold you this stuff, it was "as is" not "known good" then eh? I think that's a smart move on the new null modem cable. Did you buy the extra CPU module from a different seller? Did that seller say it was known good?

Can you tell if the fan on the crossbow is spinning up? I just took a look at 1.4 crossbows on fleabay, and they're pretty expensive. In fact pretty much everything SGI related on fleabay is more expensive than it was 10 years ago...

Y888099 wrote:

vishnu wrote: LT Spice

I put 500 euro in Tina-v8. It's the best spice ever.
LT Spice comes from a limited version of it.

Well yes, LT Spice started out as a derivation from the final release of Berkeley Spice, but by now it's been completely re-written in C and enhanced a million times over. In my experience simulating complicated analog circuits LT Spice is anywhere from 100 to 1000 times faster than OrCAD Spice, and in some situations OrCAD Spice completely fails to come up with any solution. I'm sure Tina 8 is good, and 500 Euro is a great price (esp. when compared to the Chinese telephone number price Cadence charges for OrCAD), but until such time as LT Spice fails to come up with the goods (which I doubt will ever happen) it will remain as my simulator du jour...

It would be pretty cool to have that on IRIX but those ebay prices are awfully expensive especially given that all those images are now easily accessible on the Internet.

If you request a wiki account you could add that to the wiki yourself, most nekochan members (or at least the ones who stick around for more than a day or two) end up getting one...

Wow, that's a gem! Is there a date on the packing list?

Interesting, four years after the Indy first came out:

Here's the link to request an account, nekochan members are automatically approved:

http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Special:RequestAccount

I think the closest we've got to a VBOB expert here is uunix, speaking for myself I've never been able to get mine to work properly...

uunix wrote: Thanks for the honour Vishnu , but it may be miss-placed somewhat.

My VBOB usage has been strictly limited to using it with discreet products and if I get signal present output when I serial into the VBOB I'm generally happy.

What I do know, you can see serial 2 is receiving something by console access v --> s
Also in the init.cfg of a discreet product you can set the video line to serial1 or serial2 but not serial1and2 like you can with the output.

Probably not very helpful I'm afraid.

I think development of the VBOB was a collaborative effort between Discreet and SGI. A workstation and a VBOB by themselves aren't really good for much. There used to be a webpage or two that described how NBC used Octanes and VBOBs with Discreet products in their coverage of the Olympics around a decade ago, but looking for it now it appears none of that content appears to be around anymore.

uunix wrote: Thanks for the honour Vishnu , but it may be miss-placed somewhat.

My VBOB usage has been strictly limited to using it with discreet products and if I get signal present output when I serial into the VBOB I'm generally happy.

What I do know, you can see serial 2 is receiving something by console access v --> s
Also in the init.cfg of a discreet product you can set the video line to serial1 or serial2 but not serial1and2 like you can with the output.

Probably not very helpful I'm afraid.

I think development of the VBOB was a collaborative effort between Discreet and SGI. A workstation and a VBOB by themselves aren't really good for much. There used to be a webpage or two that described how NBC used Octanes and VBOBs with Discreet products in their coverage of the Olympics around a decade ago, but looking for it now it appears none of that content has survivied.

LarBob wrote: Honestly I wonder if I've just gotten extremely unlucky and the cable I ordered still isn't a true null-modem cable. This is the 13w3 cable I ordered , shouldn't it be correct? I wonder if both the cables just don't work properly or something and I just got super unlucky. I kind of doubt it, but maybe? I don't know.. Maybe it is just the system board, but the health light is on like it's getting a link.

That's for sure the right 13W3->VGA adapter, what kind of monitor do you have it hooked up to? But you're right, so far you've had a lot of bad luck. However I do agree that your new null modem cable might be suspect. If you have an ohmmeter you can check if pin 2 on one end goes to pin 3 on the other, and vice versa. If not, for example if pin 2 goes to pin 2 and pin 3 goes to pin 3, you don't have a null modem cable and you're right back where you started. The next problem would be that either your CPU modules are bad or your graphics module is bad, or both. As I said, bad luck...

Dodoid wrote: Also, "a descendant of the Indy will be used in Time Warner's test of interactive TV"

That was the last thing Jim Clark championed at SGI before he left to found a tiny little startup named Mosaic Communications (later renamed, following an acrimonious legal battle with the University of Illinois, Netscape).

They spelled Bent Hagemark's name wrong...

Deluxe! Can I have it?

To paraphrase Homer Simpson; I would gladly kill everyone in this room for one drop of sweet beer...