Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - Printable Version

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Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - nater1217 - 06-21-2021

I recently purchased an Indigo2 with ZX graphics. This is my first SGI system. I'm trying to get a good video output, but my monitor has vertical lines through the image. I noticed that the mouse cursor is on top of the lines and isn't affected. Does this mean that the graphics board is bad, or other hardware problems? I already tried reseating it, though I have not tried reseating the RAM or splitting the graphics boards and reseating that connection. Any suggestions? 

Pictures are here: https://imgur.com/a/giXRX99

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RE: Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - robespierre - 06-22-2021

There may be corroded or broken traces on the graphics boards, or dust in the bus connectors.

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RE: Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - dexter1 - 06-22-2021

Next to reseating and checking, you could try the following:

- Clean the board contacts with deoxid
- Try moving it to slot #1 : I'm not sure it will work because i can't remember if the gfx card is required to be in slot #0
- Boot into IRIX if possible and restart the X server:
/usr/gfx/stopgfx
/usr/gfx/startgfx
If that clears the display issue, this looks like a problem downloading the express firmware to the XZ board. This sometimes happen with my GU1 (also an express card)

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RE: Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - robespierre - 06-22-2021

(06-22-2021, 07:28 AM)dexter1 Wrote:  I'm not sure it will work because i can't remember if the gfx card is required to be in slot #0

The graphics can be plugged into any of the slots. For XZ, there are 3 positions possible.

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RE: Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - jan-jaap - 06-22-2021

That looks like a particularly bad case of the "pinstripe of death".

I believe it's coming from the "image engine" section of the graphics board. Each graphics board has several / many of these image engines, and they interleave the total screen in vertical lines. If one (or it's part of frame buffer memory?) fails, you get a vertical line of noise or "stuck pixels".

Here's another example:



(that's from Ian Mapleson)

Reality Engines are prone to this, and some of the older big iron graphics as well (GTX). Amazingly, I've never seen it in a VGX.
You're not going to fix this reseating the RAM of the system. This is internal to the graphics board. Another clue is the mouse cursor which isn't affected -- it's using as separate overlay plane which is another part of the frame buffer. If this system was old enough to run NeWS (IRIX 3.x) the same would be true for the desktop menu and that too would probably not be affected by pin-striping.

The XZ graphics are two PCBs. Maybe you get lucky if you take the sandwich apart and put them back together. Clean the connector with some alcohol eventually.

If this system has a working IRIX installation on the hard disk, you can hook up a serial console and run the diagnostics.

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RE: Broken graphics card, or Sync on Green problem? - nater1217 - 06-22-2021

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I split the graphics card and cleaned the connections between them and the riser connector and it started working!!
I just used some CRC contact cleaner I had lying around. Now I can start working on getting IRIX installed.

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