Ongoing saga of the SGI Indigo game machine hack.

The ongoing saga of my gaming box continues with mixed results. On a positive note, removing the internals of my SGI Indigo was very easy. But when it came time to do some metal cutting with the dremmel I was stopped cold. It all came down to the fact that the dremmel I have sucks more than a category 5 tornado.

If you've never seen a SGI Indigo, there's a photograph below. Originally this box would have served as a graphics visualization workstation, ahem, thousands of dollars, *cough*, *cough*, but it cost me $5CDN, though it was mostly gutted.



The back of this machine is equally interesting. Note the SCSI port. SGI builds visually interresting boxes, and they're easy to disassemble compared to some PC's. This picture also shows the graphics board. Note how it has a 13w3 graphics out and the standard SVGA out - I wonder if it would work with my Sun 13w3 monitor?



First the good stuff. Removing the metal internals from the plastic SGI Indigo case was easy, all I had to do was flip the case upside down and apply a little pressure to the open metal tabs (see photograph), and the case slid out nicely. I decided that it was a good idea to stick with the original metal casing instead of trying to fit a new housing inside. The old SGI metal casing has sliders that can hold hard drives, and while I'll have to retro-fit the drives, I'll be simpler than trying to get metal shaped just the right size from scratch. I took the cover off an old floppy drive. The cover is going to be welded inside to hold up the power supply, which I'm mounting vertically. I may have to do some slight cutting of the plastic case, but the sucky dremmel seems okay with plastic, so I should be able to buff things up.



I ran into another snag because the motherboard plus expansion cards is too big to fit mounted within the metal. By removing the metal brackets from all the cards I was able to cut down the card size and make them fit better, but not enough to accommodate the larger cards like the sound blaster awe 64. If I can cut the top portion of the metal within the case I'll be fine.

The gutted plastic of the indy:



I did manage to cut some metal off the back of the metal case after removing the electronic backplane, but I had to use a hack saw to cut the case, and the saw I used was not very good. I removed a small square off the back of the case. At some point I'm going to need someone to clean up the back of this thing. I could have solved some of my problems by going with an ATX board with onboard video, sound, etc., but the point was to use parts lying around, and I wanted to use the ATI Rage II+DVD card which has TV out and SVideo ports on it.

On the software side, I installed a base installation of Debian via NFS. After the base install was finished and I tried to install further packages I ran into a bump, the new machine, dubbed cougar, doesn't want to nfs mount the partition on my notebook.



I know the connection is working because I can ping the notebook, and the firewall has been yanked. The problem, courgar reports, has something to do with rpc timing out. I can see lights flashing on the notebook hard drive, so I know from time to time it's trying to do something. The problem seems to be on cougar's (desktop/gaming box) end. After doing the base install I think some of the NFS instruction got left off. I may have to hook up a CD-ROM to complete this, but I'll probably try ftp first.