SGI indigo2 adventures

hi!!

in this post i'll be talking about the Silicon Graphics [or SGI] Indigo2 computer and my current status of getting it to be a working system, which i'll then use for a coding project that has been floating around in my head, and probably some other things. this has been a tumultuous process that has taken about a year to do, and i'm both happy and incredibly frustrated with where i have got and where i currently am, respectively.

i knew after i graduated high school that i'd likely be without anything to do for a while, and i had a bit of money saved up, so i looked online to splurge a little bit on a computer i've always wanted. it was between a fujitsu FM TOWNS and the SGI Indigo2, and as we already know, I picked the latter. it was relatively cheap, but hadn't been tested past a powerup check, which was successful - usually the power supply is the thing that bugs out, so it was looking good. it came from a guy in a small community near Budapest, Hungary, but actually originated elsewhere [we'll get to that in a bit].

anyways, my ebay bid is successful and within a few days the computer is on its way. it travels through such beautiful locations as France, Germany, and eventually ending up here, in Canada. the problems begin as soon as we get the notification it's here: another 50 bucks blown on postal duties. and, uhh... the box is completely tattered, barely being held together at all. i picked it up and remember hearing rattling. i'm sure you know where this is going... the computer was completely and utterly destroyed. every piece of plastic on that case had shattered into a billion little pieces, i nearly cried seeing it all fall apart, at first i wasn't sure if it could be salvaged at all. but as luck would have it, the plastic had actually saved every other piece of the puzzle, the inside, while loaded with the standard computer dust - was totally fine. it refused to boot, but obviously, this was the least of my problems - the case could not simply be glued back together, every inch of the plastic was brittle.

on extremely short notice, we found a very helpful guy in Oakville [a nearby town] who had a spare case - we used the refund money we got [the original seller was very understanding and kind] to buy the case minus an extra ethernet card, which I already had. the only issue with it is that it's not the correct color, the computer is supposed to be teal but the purple case was intended for later models - whatever, at least we have a case now. i cleaned and transplanted every last piece of the computer into the new case, but it still refuses to boot. the two hard drives appear to be dead, at first.

well, shit, now i need a scsi cd drive... so more refund money blown on a really basic samsung drive that supports the Indigo2's weird requirement [512k blocksize]. it works fine and finally I can boot diagnostics off IRIX backup disks, which is a huge leap forward. after a lot of searching I found some info on how to manual-pass a hard drive using "fx", the built in partition manager. for days, i ran this on the primary hard drive, and eventually, after replacing god knows how many bad blocks, everything just decided to work!

almost. of course, the thing is locked with a password... after figuring out how to fix that, we are finally in. the computer was once owned by a university, and was used as a web server for projects by students, as well as for 3D stuff - a copy of softimage is installed. cool! around this time, the samsung drive decided to die on me for no apparent reason, so I bought another one - this time from nakamichi. it is still working just fine.

the bigger problems begin after the samsung failure - it turns out the fx trick doesn't work on the second hard drive, which is really, really dead, and after stupidly taking it apart completely I broke the hard drive heads because i'm a dumbass. the platters are still lying around somewhere, but I doubt data could be recovered from them, and i have no idea if someone could begin to figure out how to do that. the primary drive starts to rear its ugly head, i could tell a lot of programs weren't working as they should, and the hard drive was terribly slow, keeping in mind that i am used to that sort of thing. i updated the version of IRIX on the machine, which ended up being a terrible idea because it made the computer even slower, but I thought maybe the updated components would be working better than the old ones [they were not].

it's at this point that i decided the best course of action would be to get the files off the hard drive before it inevitably died, and this ended up being so infuriating that i stopped working on the computer for nearly half a year so I didn't have to suffer through that shit. more programs on IRIX stopped working completely, such as jot, the only text editor for IRIX that doesn't use a command line. eventually, I started working on it again and actually made decent progress - I was able to bridge my modern computer and the Indigo2, but only on the built-in ethernet and not the much faster ethernet card. after a while i found the driver for said card, and literally as it was done installing, i restarted the computer and the hard drive decided to bite the dust. great.

since i wasn't actually planning on buying new hard drives for this machine so soon, i had a look on ebay and the fantastic SGI depot site to see what my options were. it turns out the indigo2 supported a variety of SCA/SCSI type drives up until the U320, which were once a very popular option for business-types. i bought 2 IBM branded ones that seem to fit the bill, but for some reason the computer couldn't actually write to the drives at all. in fact, it seems the partitions on said drives were partially corrupted or something, and I ended up getting a full refund. i opted to go for U160 drives this time, thinking maybe a slight downgrade would be more worth the while, but this time the computer couldn't even detect the drives at all. this is where it sits today, a lonely Indigo2 with no working hard drives, likely not for a while anyway, that went through a strange repair process chock full of dumb bullshit.

That's a shitty story, huh? let's end it on a more positive note. the other computer, the Fujitsu FM Towns, had a great emulator called Unz that's compatible with most models and software of the computers. unfortunately, it was last updated in 2010, and despite it being a great emulator, it was in desperate need of new features. the most notable fallback of Unz is that it was unable to use a disk image as the CD drive, although this could be circumvented with drive emulation like Virtual CloneDrive or CDemu/WinCDemu; the average user would have a harder time figuring that out. Enter Soji Yamakawa, the programmer behind YSFlight, who decided to continue the hard job of emulating the FM Towns. The best part is, this time, it's completely open source. Over the past 2 years the emulator has reached an estimated 95% compatibility rate with all FM Towns software, plus, Soji is working on rewriting the ROM files, which will make the emulator entirely self-contained!

If I ever end up getting a job one of these days, I'll be saving extra from my paychecks for the FM Towns - even in emulation, it's such a fun computer to work with, I couldn't recommend it enough. If you're interested, here's a link to Tsugaru, Soji's FM Towns emulator.

Hopefully my Indigo2 will one day have a happy ending as well. For now, it'll stay dormant until I have more patience to fix the hard drives - or buy some new ones.

Thanks for reading, and check back later for more Indigo2 updates!

kait