[weblacky]

Wow!  That's a fascinating write-up of a very detailed and thorough analysis.  I wish I understood more of it, LOL! 

It's write-ups like these that are my favourite part of the forum because I can learn from them now, and may need them for reference in the future.

Great work.  It is much appreciated.

Funny,
I cannot fit all that hexadecimal work from the Fuel POD PIMM flashing work in my head..not used to it and cannot hold that much in a mental image.  I think those among us from technical fields (especially in IT or the like) share a common knowledge and then each other's experience sort of creeps out of the venn diagram into being unique.  But it's the unique experiences that are most valuable when we come together as a group.

But I take the time to write these because that's how I learned (reading or watching people's troubleshooting mindset and systematic steps).

That being said (without going off on a tangent), I wish we had more of this going on.  Because as much as I like making sure we have all the software we want and people willing to work on that front...not enough people are working on the machines themselves.  Perhaps the idea is once MAME is all awesome...you don't need or want an SGI anymore to run SGI stuff.  I hope that's not going to be the dominant case but it might be.  Right now SGIs have worth for two real reasons: 1. They look cool and have serious history and 2. They've not been fully emulated to be able to run the dedicated software applications performantly (yet).  So if you want to run an SGI, you need an SGI.  They are also much more rare than normal 80's/90's machines, so there is scarcity.

We have systems coming out of storage broken and part prices rising, we need to work now while parts are affordable to be used for training.  I didn't do any of this 4 years ago...but after needing to start fixing household appliances and cars recently I purposely dove into this topic (after getting turn off in my teens/20's years due to the math involved with teaching electrical engineering (which you don't need at all for general repair, by the way) again.  I realize people have lives, I've just aligned my life to this work for silver lining.  But just like vintage cars and such, people have to raise their hands and start tackling/learning new stuff, otherwise we all end up riding a slow train into the ditch as system after system fails and people are priced out of this hobby (or after something they had breaks, they just give up after all that time and dump it all in frustration).

I'm not telling anyone to steal food out your children's mouths but invest in yourself (which really does help you whole family in some ways).  I'm not a schooled/trained engineer for hardware or even microprocessors/firmware.  But I've read stuff and still read and I try what I can within acceptable risk (I think) because I have just great memories of these and fixing them up run like new gives me the ability to enjoy them all over again, in a new way!