[rescue] Silicon Graphics Iris Crimson 4,400 RISC 150 Mhz

[Andreas Backhaus]

Hi,

> >So how good of a box is this in day to day terms? I've found that it
> >caps out at this processor and Irix 6.2, but they're asking $50. Is
> >this a good deal or do I wait and hope the price gets dropped again?
>
> Thats a *DAMN* good deal.  I have two left *hint* *hint* and they are 
> going for $285.  I have a Crimson 150mhz/256mb/2x9gb/RE as part of my 
> desk and it runs blender great, works fine with some of the 
> (admittedly simple) gl stuff that I'm toying with to learn gl.  It 
> does cap out at 6.2.  Reports of 6.5 are out there but seem to be 
> false(unfortunately).  The 6.2 cd also is unable to boot a standalone 
> fx on a crimson.  So if you don't have prelabled disks you'll need 
> annother SGI box or a 5.3 cd to fx the disk.  If you use 5.3 however, 
> you won't be able to use XFS.  I seem to have misplaced my 5.3 cd, as 
> I was going to ISO this for annother list member doing the same thing.

  Although harder to find, there is IRIX 5.3+XFS. So, even on 5.3 you4re
not always limited to EFS.

  The 6.2 CDs do have both an IP17 sash and an IP17 fx. At least my set
has ;-)

  It4s just called sashIP17 (or was that sash.IP17?) and fx.IP17, you
can4t use sashARCS because Crimson doesn4t have an ARCS PROM. So booting
your Crimson and running fx from the PROM should look like this: 

  boot -f dksc(0,Y,8)sashIP17 dksc(0,Y,7)stand/fx.IP17 --x

  Where Y is the SCSI ID of the CD-ROM. I4m not sure which one has a dot
(.IP17) and which not. However, you can always look that up by mounting
the 6.2 CD on another IRIX box.

  If your system is an RE Crimson... there4s a nasty bug in the PROM that
sometimes doesn4t echo anything back to the graphics console. You might
need a terminal to install IRIX on such a system. I never had an Crimson
RE, so I4m not completely sure about what the exact procedure & problem
was, but I remember people reporting having trouble.

  Blender is 6.5 only nowadays. You need to find an older version that
runs on 6.2 - they even had both an IRIS GL and an OpenGL version back
then. 


Cheers
Andreas