[massiverobot]

I assembled some ebay pieces last night and got my Indigo to boot for the first time last night.

* The SUN VGA adapter trick worked fine (rip out all non-ground pins)
* I luckily enough had kept a SOG Dell Panel around (didn't know it was SOG till last night)
* The USB to Key/Mouse adapter  was a bust - no mouse but keyboard works. I got the PS2 one just in case
* Hinv showed me the goods - this system has the Elan board
* It has 96G of Ram
* I knew about the TOD battery and soldered a new one in (thanks to the great docs here)


Photos:
https://imgur.com/a/iOmDzp0 [fixed this url so it works]


Thanks for your helpful info to make this first part a success. Next to to get a working mouse and try to network book and install 6.5 on this guy - using this SCSI to CF adapter I have (it's worked on Mac and Amiga).

[mamorim01]

Congrats!

You are probably better off if you can connect a real drive, the scsi2sd interface may suffice in an Amiga but I think it will struggle here. Definitely interested to hear how it performs.

[dexter1]

He mentioned having a SCSI to CF adapter, so this might be better in terms of speed than the SCSI2SD
But an 100mhz R4000 (the 50MHz is the processor bus which gets doubled internally) with 96 MB memory can't run IRIX 6.5 smoothly. I suggest finding a bit more ram if you want to go that route

[BackPlaner]

Nice job! I have an R4400 Elan and it's still my first and favorite out of my whole collection.
Just keep in mind that you can only run up to 6.5.22 on it, don't think it can handle anything later than that.
I'm not sure how big your hard drive is but with 96 Megs of RAM, you might be better off just keeping 5.3 on it. It's really what works best with it and it's got a lot smaller footprint as well. Just my $.02.

[mamorim01]

I only have experience with an scsi2sd interface, but I do not believe a CF interface will fare much better. I do not think they can compare with a traditional hard drive when fitted to this type of computers, but that is just my experience. Early Macs or Amigas are entirely different systems as far as requirements are concerned.

My feeling is the system could use a 10k or 15k scsi drive, it is already going to be CPU starved with 6.5 in play, the last thing it probably needs is slow read/write speeds.

My Indigo2 was originally fitted with a R4000 and an old Conner hard drive. Replacing it with a Cheetah 10k drive changed the responsiveness dramatically under 6.5. Increasing memory to 192MB was also a very noticeable improvement.

That is a nice machine, anyhow.

[gijoe77]

i tested an indigo2 with scsi2sd (version 6) running both 5.3 and 6.5 earlier this year (posted on nekochan, didn't bother saving any of the results since I thought they would be online, sigh...), but the scsi2sd worked very nice with 5.3, I wasn't really able to tell the difference from the old drive and the SD card. If the Indigo stays on 5.3 the scsi2sd might be just fine.

IRIX 6.5 ran very sluggish on scsi2sd, I don't recommend it for 6.5 just yet. I noticed the most recent updates to scsi2sd made some write speed improvments, so I just might give it another spin before the end of this year and see how it goes.

[massiverobot]

Digging this out I actually have a SCSI to SATA- it's not based on the SCSI2SD design at all, rather this:

http://www.stratos-technology.com/cgi/Sh...TileViewer

I've plugged it in and i think there are some termination errors but the bootprom shows a scsi device attached with it connected.

Picts:
https://imgur.com/a/VZopoki

I may pick up a scsi2cd if this doesn't work.

I will also pick up some more ram.

[mamorim01]

Digging this out I actually have a SCSI to SATA- it's not based on the SCSI2SD design at all, rather this:

http://www.stratos-technology.com/cgi/Sh...TileViewer

I've plugged it in and i think there are some termination errors but the bootprom shows a scsi device attached with it connected.

Picts:
https://imgur.com/a/VZopoki

I may pick up a scsi2cd if this doesn't work.

I will also pick up some more ram.

Do share how that one goes. Probably a jumper issue, have not checked docs but you should probably be okay closing 1 and T and leaving the two other ones (2, 4) open.

[gijoe77]

oh wow, I never even heard of stratos before, hope it works, it looks like it might be very useful...

[massiverobot]

It's worth it just for the noise factor to get some sort of flash disk working on this thing. I'm telling you that Baracudda sounded like a jet taking off and it never got quiet. It's nice to have the Indigo booted and not even hear it.

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oh wow, I never even heard of stratos before, hope it works, it looks like it might be very useful...

Yes- these are actually what I have in my Mac and Amiga. They are more expensive than the SCSI2SD but well worth it.

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Just found some pretty cheap 32M SIMMS on ebay, and I have 4 free RAM slots so I got 128M more ram for the Indigo. We'll see what a 6.5.22 install looks like once I get the netbooting setup and a working mouse.