Re: powerstorm 4d40t support.
sorry for late answer, i've been more than busy last few days. i've played
a bit with my alpha in few spare moments and i'm generally pleased with it.
except the graphics ;)
so, on the topic again...
On the 13th of September 2003 at 15:14, Jaakko Linnosaari <jlinnosa#cc.hut.fi> wrote:
>> but, after some googling and browsing through various documents, i can
>> see that there's almost no support for the graphic card i have in that
>> box - quite impressively looking [1] one: the intergraph powerstorm
>> 4d40t.
> Yup, my recommendation would be to get some old Matrox-card to replace it,
> eg. Millenium or G200; good support in xfree and srm.
several people advised that. does that mean that i can put in any pci card
supported in kernel? or, do i have to flash the card's rom first (like they
do with ati/nvidia cards to work with macintosh)? getting old matrox is more
than tempting, if that's so simple.
On the 14th of September 2003 at 16:32, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw#lug-owl.de> wrote:
>> 0:1/boot/vmlinux-2.4.21-1 ro root=/dev/sda1 video=mode:1024x768
>> correct?
>> *reboot*
>> yay! i can see a penguin on boot :))) much better (although i did something
>> strange to scsi support and the system refused to give me login prompt ;))
>>
>> anyways, that's progress. i'll keep you informed :)
>
> Could you please post a 'dmesg' output from right after boot?
http://600au.bigendian.org/dmesg.txt
that's the dmesg i got when booting with generic debian woody kernel.
unfortunately, i can't make my alpha boot with self-compiled one :(((
there's something wrong with scsi support. after recognizing the controller
(qlogic 1020), i got neverending messages:
scsi: aborting command due to timeout : pid 0, scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun0 inquiry 00 00 00 ff 00
i've tried various kernel configurations, from really minimal to fat with all
scsi drivers compiled in, but i'm still stuck with scsi init :(
that's the 2.4.21 from debian kernel-source package.
> I suspect that you by possibility got vga16fb or something like that to
> work. On that graphics card that you own, the CL chip is only used for a
> very small amount of 2D work.
i'd be happy even with that, i think. i don't need fast graphics or fancy
stuff, just decent framebuffer console.
> These high-end cards commonly use some wracky old chip to do simple
> work, but also contain some high-end rendering engines. So writing a
> "driver" for these beasts isn't just doing the Cirrus Logic chip, but
> it's about accessing the rendering engines. That's not only complicated
> (because you need a whole lot of userspace support), but also a really
> hard job because there are no specs available...
thank you for explaination. it seems i can't do much except cursing
intergraph :/
On the 13th of September 2003 at 21:07, Kelledin <kelledin+DAXP#skarpsey.dyndns.org> wrote:
>> now, i'm really confused :) i can't say that you're wrong because i don't
>> know that hardware (and can't find any decent description of it). and in
>> fact there's something like scsi cable socket. i can't see anywhere any
>> network components - what makes you think they are there? :)
> I'm basing my judgment off spotting a few things; namely, the three
> heatsink'd chips, the memory slots, the 50-pin SCSI connector, and the
> LSILogic chip (LSILogic primarily manufactures SCSI controller chips).
you're right :)
i wonder which kernel driver works with it (if any).
> (I'll have to revise my opinion of network presence on that thing though--I
> got a look at the ports from the back, and what I thought was a network port
> actually looks to be an S-Video port. Never mind that, sorry.)
as you can see on the photos (link below), there's 3 outputs: one vga (i use
that), one which looks like vga, but is black, not blue. the monitor doesn't
show anything when i connect it (no signal detected). the last one is s-video
like.
> I'm guessing the black and blue ports are both monitor ports--my quick
> research suggests the 4D40T is a dual-head card. My own personal knowledge
> of the CL 5440 is that it should by no means require that much board
> real-estate or the three heatsink'd chips we see on the baseboard. The
> extra chips under the heatsinks are probably tied to another video head--a
> high-end (for its day) professional OpenGL accelerator.
sounds cool. again, curses to intergraph :(
>> but, i have separate cards for network and external scsi support (the
>> internal seems to be on the motherboard): take a look at
>> http://babilon.org/Alpha/05.jpg, there's green card in the top right box'
>> corner, that's the external scsi thing. and' next to it there's tulip card:
>> http://babilon.org/Alpha/12.jpg
> Hmmm...interesting. Well, you're set for that then. Now that I look at the
> motherboard, I'm seeing the 21143 and QLogic controller chips for the thing.
small correction: what i thought is external scsi interface appeared to be
sound card :> sorry :) you can see that card on the pictures, there's two
mini-jacks in sockets and a joystick port (i think).
>> anyone has idea what's use of those two dimm slots on that powerstorm card?
>> (i know that i can put there memory ;) but: how much, and what would it be
>> used for?)
> I'm guessing they're for extra video RAM, probably for the high-end 3D usage
> the card was built for (i.e. storing 3D textures and mesh data in the card's
> local memory).
can be. i think that my alpha was used for cad before. i managed to boot tru64
which survived on the disk, the hostname was "cad64" or so. unfortunately,
the boot process stopped at nfs mounting and i was not able to do anything
after that.
>> if someone is really interested, i can make more (and better :)) pictures
>> of this computer.
> Definitely interested! I'd personally like to see closer pics of the vidcard,
> so I could maybe make out more of the writing on the chips.
i hope you'll be happy with last few photos which i added to the old ones.
they are moved now to: http://600au.bigendian.org/pictures.php
> This is like an old-school hardware nostalgia fest.
:)
> The output of lspci (with all boards in) might prove interesting too.
http://600au.bigendian.org/lspci.txt
> I'm also curious about the chips under those heatsinks. They look like
> they're epoxied on there, but there are ways to weaken thermal epoxy --
> usually putting the card in a sealed anti-static bag and sticking it in your
> freezer overnight will do it. Then take the card out and let it acclimate
> to room-temp before opening the anti-static bag. That might be a lot of
> work though, just to satisfy someone else's curiosity...
uh, i'm not so brave :)
On the 14th of September 2003 at 16:37, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw#lug-owl.de> wrote:
>> anyone has idea what's use of those two dimm slots on that powerstorm card?
>> (i know that i can put there memory ;) but: how much, and what would it be
>> used for?)
> I think that 256MB should be easily doable...
256mb for graphics stuff? impressive, taking into consideration that this
card is dated 1997 :)
m.m.
--
use gnus, not guns!
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