Comment by Keyframe
11 hours ago
I worked vfx on teal Indigo2 at the time and then max impact purple one.. later on Octane, Octane2, etc.
BUT, this second generation of SGIs felt special. Ok a third gen, but the first one in beige boxes does not count. Crimson in gen before was also special.
Years later I was given a machine I worked on, since I'm in retro machines and game and all and to my disappointment it was the purple one, not teal (teal got lost somewhere). Now, imagine that since purple one is vastly superior to teal one, hah. Got indy along with it, webcam and all to be web ready!
I only skimmed through article for now, but is there a specific reason you haven't went with period-correct IRIX 5.x and went with 6? On a side note, SD2SCSI or similar to get rid of the spinning rust? And ultimate question, what do we all do with power supplies? They will die.
(author) Just because I'm used to 6.5, no other reason particularly. Any of the SCSI emulators are generally fine but I now gravitate to the ones that let you run multiple devices from image files because that makes it very easy to do backups. Here I used a ZuluSCSI, which is also one of the ones where if you have an existing drive, it will clone it for you in initiator mode.
The power supplies are a bigger question, but some work has been done on this already with other systems, notably the Fuel. There is at least a way to repair the Impact supplies' caps, though that's not all that can go wrong. I expect we'll eventually see conversion kits for these other big systems at some stage.