[weblacky]

I tried to dabble with the debug switch combos and got really irritated that nothing seemed to work (nothing changed in the PROM output that I could tell) when I ANDed or ORed the debug position values so I stuck with what worked. I would be interested to know if "custom" debug switch combos actually work..I wasted like 30 mins and just called it... :-(

As I mentioned there is currently a low chance I might be getting some Fuel hardware to repair on in the future, should I get such projects I'll be in a better position to try crazy stuff like this on a "beater" system. Still too scared to ruin my only Fuel on actual fiddling, but I think the debug mode checks and the memory struct dumps (and refinement of the direct struct access commands) is a safe and possible helpful way of 'getting closer" to getting there...

But I agree with you that there must be a place in the process where these can be changed during bootstrap as you can obviously fiddle with the memory, while I don't know about the "flash" part of access versus it's a shadow copy of the contents, it seems like SGI MUST have had a way to solve this problem easily without handing out 800/900 Mhz processor to techs :-). So the alteration of the core values during init seems doable and a temporary change to get into Irix to then make the permanent flash change.