indigo magic

Sunday, October 31, 2004, at 06:42PM

By Eric Richardson

Yesterday I finally got around to doing something about the SGI Indigo I had sitting in my living room. If you remember back to July you'll note that this box had a dead clock battery, which thanks to some smart design work, made it completely inoperable. And, oh yeah, the battery was soldered onto the motherboard.

But that didn't stop me. I used my trusty soldering iron to loosen things up and get the old battery out, and then yesterday I went to Radio Shack and picked up a new 3.6V battery, some paired wire, and some electrical tape. You can see a few pictures on my buzznet site.

So the machine now boots. Here's my hinv output:

clu 10% hinv
CPU: MIPS R4000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.2
FPU: MIPS R4000 Floating Point Coprocessor Revision: 0.0
1 100 MHZ IP20 Processor
Main memory size: 64 Mbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 1 Mbyte on Processor 0
Instruction cache size: 8 Kbytes
Data cache size: 8 Kbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision C
  Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
  CDROM: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
On-board serial ports: 2
On-board bi-directional parallel port
Graphics board: GR2-Elan
Integral Ethernet: ec0, version 1
Iris Audio Processor: revision 10

The cool part is that GR2-Elan line. The three hard drives are all really small (1gig and 2 .5gigs), so that makes life fun (though I installed a clean IRIX inside a gig yesterday). I think I might have some memory lying around that I can try to bump that 64meg up with.