Stewpit Indy questions <:-/

The ARCS machines (IP19, IP22 and above) are very forgiving as far as type of CD-ROM drive, I've used Toshiba and Apples just fine on mine. Older 4D machines needed some firmware tweaks that made the drive look like a fixed disk for the initial SASH load from PROM. The "video" thing on SGIs is substantially different from PCs. What is called "video" in PCs is called "graphics" in SGIs (and many other workstations). SGI graphics are very good, even 8-bit Indy. The video addons were for video feeds, and included Indy Video and Cosmo Compress boards. Stock Indys shipped with video-input (composite, S-video, and proprietary digital), but no output. Indy Video provided this. Disk bandwidth is not great enough to capture full motion/screen video to disk without the Cosmo Compress card. Both options are expensive, if you want to edit video get a Mac with FireWire. Sound is quite good, and includes digital I/O (but not S/PDIF- for that you need an Octane). I'd recommend IRIX 6.2- it's fast on older hardware, 64-bit (but the Indy isn't quite- it will still run N32, though, which 5.3 won't), and has POSIX compliance via patches. IDF/IDL can be downloaded, and GCC 3.4 is pretty decent on MIPS hardware. Building software on 6.2 is less "informative" than 5.3, also. In any case, a good set of electronic manuals ships on the distro media, as well as being available from techpubs on SGIs website. Gotchas- don't set anything to SCSI ID0 - that's the controller on SGI machines. Enjoy your new toy- you'll probably start saving up money for an Octane.