SGI retrocomputing.
Some time at the end of the nineteen hundreds, I took the Indy and O2 that I had liberated from Netscape and retired them to a shelf in my laundry room. They worked fine at the time that I did that! Now, not so much. Neither...
https://jwz.org/b/ykMy
@jwz The standard dull answer you'll probably get from every doughy neckbeard out there is "Replace shorted or leaky capacitors (particularly in the power supply), and try a BlueSCSI in place of the drive to see if you can get the solid state parts to boot."
Turns out a lot of "solid state" electronics was little cans of acid.
@spacehobo Any suggestion that begins with "do some speculative surface-mount soldering" might as well just say "throw it in the trash".
@jwz Yeah except the surface-mount stuff isn't the risky stuff. Usually it's tantalums near the power rails that shorted out, for this era of machine.
@jwz @spacehobo If it works, sits for over a decade, then doesn’t work, it’s the capacitors. Or mice! You can probably find someone to recap these for a couple pizzas.
@jwz @macegr Pizzas or equivalent tender
I do live in a world where that happens though. Can think of four people who would be sufficiently interested to try it, should I wave around a piece of retro computing gear with history. I think this from spending too much time online and in weird conferences.
@macegr Ok, well, good for you, but in my not-inconsiderable number of years, the number of times that trick has worked is pretty close to zero. And for many years my actual full-time paid job was basically: "convince randos to do shit for free". There's a lot of daylight between "I know four people who could do this" and "one of them is gonna come over to your house". Because the funny thing about competent people with skills is, they have shit to do.
@jwz Entirely willing to accept we have different lives and different possibilities.
Now, last year I rented some heavy equipment and passed the word about a BBQ & excavator party, and 12 friends around the Bay traveled up to 60 miles to help landscape my back yard.
Seeing as you run an actual top tier playground for nerds, I figure you could do far better while comping way less than I did in beer, food, music, and excavators.
If you know it's not going to work though, no reason to try.
@jwz We found the problem?
@jwz I'm umpteen thousand miles from my indy at the moment, else I'd have a look at my config for you, I remember having a similar problem. Hope you get a more useful answer or can wait three weeks until I can provide a better one.
@jwz re: VGA sync, is it doing Sync-on-Green (SoG)?
@jwz I have 6.5.22f media, including a custom hack of the bootable media that has the http modules inserted into the rootimage to allow it to use HTTP services, AND a full inst install script for an Indy (SGI Indy running 6.5.22f USED to be my mail server). If you need, I can hook you up. It would be an honor and a privilege!
@jwz my Indigo² once stopped recognizing its keyboard. Tracing from the i8042 microcontroller responsible for PS/2 protocol, the pinout of which is standardized in this role, showed that its clock and data pins ended up at a 74ALS32, where they're buffered and sent out the PS/2 ports, and back from there. Probing there confirmed the signals to be dead. Replaced that and it lived. The Indy is a cut-down I² so same should apply, except parts are reshuffled and not everyone is up for SMD rework.
@GeorgeRudolf I tried a *different* 90s-vintage keyboard, and it recognizes that one! So I guess something is actually wrong with the other one. I also tried a couple of USB female to PS/2 male adapters that claimed to make modern keyboards and mice work, and they do not.
@jwz yeah, the keyboard has to have the smarts to switch. Of my pile of ewaste, only one keyboard and two mice work with the adapter. Good that's sorted though!
@jwz You can use Sampling options->advanced timing on the OSSC to finetune the picture. You usually start with "active pixels" and then adjust the other parameters until it fits, but the SGIs make this easy by providing all the needed parameters in "display properties"