Good evening! It's been a few months since I've played around with the NTT Indy system, but I'll share some of my experiences with it here. Let's start off with a picture of the case.
Internally, the NTT Indy is a stock Indy for the most part: the motherboard and CPU are normal, and predictably rather low end. (R4600, 133mhz, 16mb RAM.) There are no physical provisions to install a floptical drive nor a hard drive internally: the normal mounting cage for a hard drive isn't present inside.
Beyond the custom boot ROM, the main component that makes the NTT Indy special is the "Bambi" daughterboard, which is a large single-height GIO32 board that takes up much of the space inside of the system. It provides composite video input/output/passthrough, an integrated Fore ATM network interface, an infrared receiver (presumably for some sort of remote control), and a few other functions. Here's an internal picture of the system with the Bambi board installed.
Here's a close-up view of the ports at the back of the system.
The ports on the top row are all connected to the Bambi board. Ports A1 and A2 are intended to be connected with an audio patch cable, and ports B1 and B2 are also wired together via a separate cable. Elf thankfully has one instance of the B1 to B2 cable, which I was able to pin out while I was visiting. It's also worth mentioning that the usual keyboard and mouse ports are present on the motherboard itself -- but they are blocked by the sheet metal of the case!
System startup is relatively uneventful - the composite output displays the Zoetrope splash screen once it's initialized, while the 13W3 output displays a garbled version of the same thing. This is from the 13W3 output:
Beyond that, the system waits for a serial command once it's initialized. As Elf had mentioned, the only options are either to enter the PROM or to attempt to netboot off of an as-yet unknown device.
Unfortunately, my particular Indy has an issue when connecting to it over serial, which leads to some rather... interesting behaviors, in the PROM.
Code:
NTT#1 - bilerhahn, built ed ep 20 12:5:01 DT 1995
CP board
CP is 13 MHz 4600
Primary d-cach: 16 kbytes Seconary cche: 0 kbytes
Memory sze: 16 Mbytes
NG1 board
Bt5 rev 0x, VC2 r0x0
No extenaLL CS1562, $ics is inor!
Using eault28ca06 forBt445PL
Bt445 ECL(from IC1562) clock np
Bambi boa
PC15 XND loadd
MVU rev02
rookTre Encder initializd
AMizer Frmware Rev▒▒▒▒
▒r▒R>> hnv
PROM xportVeron 27
NTT #1 - builder hahn builtWed Sep20 2:58:01 PD 995
CPU board
CPUis 133 MH R00
rimaryi-cache: 1kytes
Scndar cche: 0 kbyteses
Mmor sie: 16 Mbyts
Bt445 re 0xd, V2rev0x
No external PLL(CS1562), $ics is igned !
Env variable $pll is no set
Usingdault 28ca06 for B445 PLL
Bt445 ECL (from ICS1562) clock inpu
ambibard
HPC.5
XNDloaded
MVre 0x2
BrookTree Encode initilize
ATMizer Firmware isi 4.
So, it's a bit of a mess, and makes it impossible for me to easily dump my particular system's ROM at this time. It's only an issue with serial transmission and loopback: the system itself does seem to receive serial inputs perfectly well. Strange stuff.
I haven't yet tried to install the Bambi board in a system running IRIX yet, though I have doubts as to how much of it will function without drivers and/or the custom boot ROM.
To end off,
here's a link to all of the pictures I've taken of the machine, as well as some other prototypes from Elf's personal collection. Happy hunting!
