[weblacky]

USB to serial normally works just fine assuming it's a a good chipset that uses all the correct pins. These days everything normally works just fine. The usual prolific chipsets are usually problem free. You still have to get a cable that's not Janky though. It's more getting the correct cabling if you're not making one yourself.

In terms of hard drives I would really recommend you not use a 15K drive. First of all you need to understand that the octane is an ultra wide (UW) bus not an ultra160 or ultra320. It's limited to 80 MB a second anyway for the entire bus. So there's no point in going faster than 80 MB a second.

A 15K drive is going to have noise and heat and even though the octane is one of the better systems that can do active cooling they were designed to be a desktop not a server rack. Personally I hate using 10 K drives if I can get away with it but a 10K drive that runs cooler will work. I provided a link to SGI depot of compatible drives that were recommended as a starting point. Please see those first.

And also as I mentioned Irix only needs about 3 GB to install so a 4 GB to 6 GB hard drive is a great drive to learn on because they don't take long to erase. As I mentioned in my private message when you screw up you have to erase the drive. Erasing a large hard drive takes an incredibly long time unless you have a separate Linux system and can use DD to increase the speed of wiping the entire drive. So it's worth having smaller Drive to learn on and then once you're done you can get a larger drive to your hearts content.

Also, as I replied previously, you're better off finding an older 4 x 3 aspect LCD monitor circa 2005 to 2009 designed between 17 to 19 inches made by a large company like Dell or NEC or Samsung. Then look up the specs online and most of those supported SOG.

Only a very late model octane graphics card has a chance of reaching 1080P, so there's no point in getting a monitor that can do it. As I said the default resolution for most SGIs is a 1280 x 1024.


19 inches is about the largest monitor I ever ran across that standard expectation was SOG back in the day. But a lot of stuff between 15 to 17 supported it in the early 2000s. So if you go to a computer recycler and find a $15 Dell ultra LCD you just look up on Google and most of them supported it.


Now if you configure the cable correctly, octane2 can output separate horizontal and vertical frequencies used in modern VGA ports but it doesn't remove the SOG signal. So the counterpart to your issue is you might display the image correctly but it would have a severe green tint to the picture. Because the cable can't filter out the SOG signal. There are third-party devices that can filter the SOG signal and that is something you could go with but that's another thing to plug-in and get warm and eventually overheat on you.


So while SOG monitors aren't common SOG tolerant monitors that don't use SOG are incredibly rare. There were monitors in the past that could understand that if both signals were present that they actually would filter out SOG by their understanding of the fact that they had a Special function to do that. You won't find that in anything today. And I don't know any way to check for SOG tolerance at all.


That's why it's easier to find a monitor that uses SOG that it is to find a monitor that's tolerant of SOG but uses the horizontal vertical sync pin signals that are offered by most modern SGI.

Video is one of those things you'll just need to compromise on. We're not asking you to get a CGA TV from 1979 here. We're just asking that the easiest way to start is to just get an older LCD monitor. And not all the old LCD monitors were ghosting nightmare pieces of junk. There were lots of good monitors in 2007 and 2008 that supported all this stuff and looked just fine they just happened to be 17" instead of 23".

Just look on eBay for local pick up only or other places find a square aspect LCD of the proper vintage look up its model online and check it as SOG compatibility and just go ahead and purchase it and pick it up. It's not worth the hassle of trying to convert to your monitor. You'll spend more money on converters and cables and weird stuff and trying to make it work than just getting the appropriate monitor.