• Final update to the old Onyx1 and Crimson machine pages coming soon (a farewell to old friends). I don't think I could ever bring myself to deface this site with photos of our rather boring replacement PeeCee gear (ho hum).

• Added pictures of the fire(!) engine red exhaust hoods fitted to the power series predator racks and the Onyx rack to both reduce their noise level (make them happy little office workers) and remove the excess heat they generate. See these on the start page here.

 
• Moved RealityEngine2 pictures to their own section on the main page and added pictures of the Multiple Channel Option board (MCO) and connectors (thanks to Steve Booth @ Pastech for the pictures)
  
  
• Added pictures of the big blowers from the top of the Onyx rack/Challenge XL machines and also a picture of a GCAM.

 
• Added details of upgrades to the Crimson IP17 board as supplied and sucessfully carried out by Bert Heise (bheise@imb-jena.de) - thanks Bert!

October 4, 2000

• Added a section to the Onyx page describing POKA/POKB errors on Onyx Rackmount/Deskside machines.

• Added piccies and slot descriptions of an Onyx Rackmount 10000 with IR gfx boards (Thanks to europictures/belGOnet!).

• Added more parts to the Onyx/Challenge Parts List - thanks to Olaf Peuschel!

 
• Added some piccies of IR gfx boards to the main Onyx RealityEngine2 page.

 

• Added many more parts to the Onyx/Challenge Parts List - including IR/Kona gfx parts and some Rack chassis parts - thanks to Olaf Peuschel!

 
• Added some piccies of IP21 and IP25 CPU boards to the main Onyx RealityEngine2 page.

 

• Details of CPU upgrades to IP19 Onyx boards. Includes details of what you need plus pictures of jumper locations etc.

 

• Add more piccies to the Onyx web page - including Sirius boards plus a few other goodies.

 
• Added hinv and gfxinfo for the the other two Onyxs and the Challenge I converted from an Onyx.

 
• Added a preliminary parts list for Onyx/Challenge - contains part numbers of boards I have or have seen elsewhere - many more to add to this. Same thing is available for Crimson/Power Series.

 

• Added a section to the Onyx web page describing and illustrating correct layout of SIMMs on an MC3. Also contains details of how to get the SIMMs out and some jumpers on this board that could be useful for testing purposes.

 
• Also added hinv and gfxinfo for the Onyx.

 

• The Onyx now has a MEZ SCSI board, 2 x RM5 raster managers and 512Mb RAM. The details of mixing 64Mb (super density) and 16MB SIMMs whilst maintaing interleaved memory access on an Onyx MC3 are a little involved - when I've worked out whether our MC3 supports interleaving in such circumstances I'll summarise with diagrams on the Onyx web page. Ian Mapleson's tests will show the results for this new config shortly.

December 1, 1999

• ONYX RealityEngine2 - we've just bought an Onyx RealityEngine2 with 256Mb RAM, 4 x R4400/150 processors, RE2 (of course) with 2 x RM4 raster managers. You can see pictures (from Dec 2) plus some details of experiences and procedures on the new Onyx RealityEngine2 page.

October 11, 1999

• Added section on RealityEngine graphics buffer config (look here for questions about when you can do antialiasing and how many raster managers are required).

• Added section on VGX/VGXT features and capabilities to the VGX/VGXT page. Describes the texture memory configuration and the differences between VGX and VGXT in more detail (some of this section existed in previous versions of this page but it has all been updated and modified to include the latest info).

• Added section on VGXT and Performer. Includes details of what performer features that VGXT supports under performer 2.0.

 
• Added board rev and gfxinfo details on the latest RealityEngine boardset we just obtained.

October 1, 1999

• Added section on RealityEngine and Performer. Includes details of what performer features RealityEngine with RM4 and RM5 support, plus some preliminary discussion on ASDs and the pfImageCache implementation I am going to try on RealityEngine.

• Updates and more information on VGX and VGXT boardsets. In particular some more information about the IEs on the RM2s and RM3s as well as the rev numbers of GM3s that support RM3s and those that do not!

• New section on installing an Onyx RealityEngine2 RM5 raster manager in Crimson/Power Series RealityEngine. It works just fine despite warnings about illegal RM4 termination which appear to be generated by the PROM and /usr/gfx/gfxinit - they dont recognize the RM5 and the RM5 (unlike the RM4) doesnt appear to have a special terminated version.

• Updated GTX page with CG2 board port descriptions and how they connect to the CG2  I/O panel controller. This will probably be the last update to the GTX page as the GTX boardset is in the cupboard to make way for RE and VGXT! Anyone want to buy it? :-)

• Updated GTX page with information and links from This Old SGI - since GT and GTX were available in the professional IRIS series (ie. 4D/70 and 4D/85). Also added description of the ports on the RV1.5 video output board.
• Added a new section on RealityEngine raster managers. When and why you should use more!
• Updated VGX/VGXT page with new information about configs and boardset revisions plus a description of the 5 video I/O ports on the DG1
• Added this Whats New? page :-)

• All that stuff thats been there for a month or two.