[ehw]

Hello!

I'm currently looking for a rare PCB for the SGI Indy that was used in the early days of Nintendo 64/Ultra 64 game development. There are one or two revisions of this board, either or them are fine. I only need the board itself, but I will consider if you wish to include an Indy as well.

Currently willing to pay $10k (US), but willing to negotiate. For serious offers please feel free to PM me. 

Seller can be from any country, but must be willing to use overnight/insured/trackable shipping. I'm currently located in the USA.

Pictures of one revision (sourced from @GamingLegend64) - first revision?


Second revision (from u/CubanR) :

[Raion]

It would be great if we could repro them from broken N64s one day

[Shiunbird]

Wow - that's some serious unobtanium right there. I hope you find it!

[TruHobbyist]

This reminds me of my journey trying to find a very rare device driver kit for Tru64 5.X. Not even HPE knew what it was, they just could acknowledge their existence (was written into their official documentation for that OS so no escape).

The way I solved this was to reverse engineer lots of code and that served my purpose. If I can give you a recommendation, it would be to look for someone who would be willing to create one from scratch. Would be for PCI based machines since GIO32/64 would be cumbersome to deal with. For 10k, this should be doable.

Have you tried contacting ex SGI/Nintendo employees on that matter? Also, ex employees from game studios that made games for N64 back in the day.

This kind of products rarely leave the internal corporate circuit. A few other examples: AIX for Itanium (yes, it existed) or the hardware emulator where at least parts of IRIX was coded on.

On a sidenote, is the label on the bottom a marketing name (DEVELOPMNET) or is it a typo?


Wish you best of luck

[ehw]

This reminds me of my journey trying to find a very rare device driver kit for Tru64 5.X. Not even HPE knew what it was, they just could acknowledge their existence (was written into their official documentation for that OS so no escape).

The way I solved this was to reverse engineer lots of code and that served my purpose. If I can give you a recommendation, it would be to look for someone who would be willing to create one from scratch. Would be for PCI based machines since GIO32/64 would be cumbersome to deal with. For 10k, this should be doable.

Have you tried contacting ex SGI/Nintendo employees on that matter? Also, ex employees from game studios that made games for N64 back in the day.

This kind of products rarely leave the internal corporate circuit. A few other examples: AIX for Itanium (yes, it existed) or the hardware emulator where at least parts of IRIX was coded on.

On a sidenote, is the label on the bottom a marketing name (DEVELOPMNET) or is it a typo?


Wish you best of luck

Thanks for the reply!

I believe there were a limited amount of these boards being made in the beginning as there weren't as many developers signing on to develop for the N64 as Nintendo/SGI had thought. The cost of the Indy by itself was high at the time, so I think Nintendo started encouraging developers to purchase IS-Viewer 64/Partner N64 cartridges that could be interfaced with a PC via either a serial or LAN connection instead. But even these were expensive and hard to obtain for developers back in the day, so some developers ended up having to buy bootleg rom copiers such as the Doctor V64 to develop games (Iguana Entertainment, developers of Turok and NBA Jam, for instance).

If I recall, I believe SGI wanted these boards sent back but I'm not sure. Information about the boards themselves is a little scarce as these are very hard to come by. A lot of the developers that would've had these boards most likely had cast them to the winds at this point. There are definitely a couple floating around out there though, so fingers crossed. 

(I think the Developmnet is just a typo, lol).

[RageX]

I regret selling mine. I wasn't doing anything with it but still...

[Raion]

Yeah I think everyone would desire one.

In the interest of not drowning out stuff I would prefer if we would all leave the chatter out; I'm not going to move anything at this point because I too am guilty but if you guys want an N64 board back you can ask in the site discussion area. It went sorely underutilized and the decomp/dev community is toxic and prefers politics and discord to permanence and archivability.