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SGI Cable Pinout Descriptions
Last change: 13/Feb/2002
Cable diagrams for most SGI cables can be found in the relevant
owners' guides, technical reports and other manuals on techpubs.sgi.com. However, some cable
descriptions are not on the site and hard to find. Thus, I will
include such descriptions on this page for easy reference. Feel free
to submit your own suggestions as to what I should include
here.
Cosmo Compress Connector Cable
For teal Indigo2 systems which have an Indigo2Video board and
CosmoCompress installed, there should be a cable that connects the
two boards together, linking the two IndyCam-type ports that are
vertically adjacent. Unfortunately, this cable is often lost, so what
do you do if you find the boards but don't have the cable? The
solution is to utilise two ordinary IndyCams, hacking the cables and
wiring them together - obviously, it would be best to find two
IndyCams that are non-functional but which still have intact cables
and connectors.
An original Cosmo connector cable is very short, just 45cm (approx.
18") long, and is quite thick, presumably heavily shielded. Thus, I
can't say for sure how good a cable made using two IndyCam cables
would be - it depends on whether all the pins inside the IndyCam
cable's connector are used. What I can say is how a genuine Cosmo
cable is wired up, which is as follows:
- Looking face-on at the two IndyCam-type connectors, held the same
way up, the pin connections are a vertical mirror image across the
two plugs. Thus, the top-left pin on one plug connects to the
bottom-left pin of the other plug. Similarly, counting rows from the
top and columns from the left, the pin at row 2 column 7 of one plug
connects to row 3 column 7 of the other plug, while row 1 column 12
connects to row 4 column 12. The column numbers stay the same, but
the row numbers are mirrored: row 1 connects to row 4, row 2 to row
3, row 3 to 2 and 4 to 1.
I don't know if all the connections are necessary, but that is how
an original Cosmo cable is internally wired.
NOTE: on the Cosmo cable I have, the connector which goes into the
CosmoCompress board's socket has an iconic picture of a video camera
on it. Since the cable is basically just a vertical pin-for-pin
swapover cable, I doubt it matters which end is connected to which
board, but this fact should at least help in identification of the
correct kind of cable. There is also what appears to be a part
number on the cable, namely 018-8217-001.
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