A question about the hardware design of Sigmarion 2

When I was browing the Yahoo! Japan auctioning site to hunt my Sigmarion III, I noticed several Sigmarion II being auctioned as well. Interestingly, according to the descriptions of many of those auctioned Sig2, the screen hinge was reported to become loose and will fall back over 90 degree. Just curious to know if this feature was intentional, or was this in fact a design fault?

Actually Sigmarion II feels a lot like Jornada 720 to me. Similar footprint, HPC 2000, reasonably sized touch-typing friendly keyboard, albeit less ROM memory (16MB vs. J720's 32MB or J728's 64MB). I kinda like the look of it too.

Edited by hpcboy 2020-10-05 2:52 PM

Yes, it's a design fault.

Take a look at this site for fixing this problem.
http://orange.zero.jp/narabu/sig2/sig2_01.html

That's ingenious! I don't know Japanese, though. What is the right size of that magic hexagon?

http://www.urban.ne.jp/home/date/sigma2/sigma2.htm is also good.

Yeah, you can always use Google Translate or Bing Microsoft Translator.
Not sure about the size of the magic hexagon.

Sweet. I love learning from this kind of blogs and even more so getting my hands dirty.
(...My soldering skills suck but I still remember how I nervously replaced the CMOS battery and upgraded my Libretto 110CT to 96MB many years back... )

Edited by hpcboy 2020-10-05 2:49 PM

Yeah, you should be able to get Sigmarion 2 / Sigmarion 1 cheap if it's "junk" on Yahoo Auction Japan, and fix it up.

I have a couple Sigmarion 1s, I might do something cool with it soon.
(I managed to get NetBSD working by following steps from a Japanese user a couple years back)

How does the Sig II compares to the Jornada in terms of speed? I always felt that MIPS processor lays behind ARM, but that may be biased because all MIPS processors I tried had lower clock speeds. I wonder how a 200MHz MIPS running HPC2000 compares to the StrongARM at 206MHz running HPC2000.

Ah, Jornada.

I actually have / had a couple Jornadas, but both were broken and suitable only for parts and fixing.
The MIPS processor is still usable in Sigmarion 2, and even Sigmarion 1 is quite speedy. I've used the device to host my site back in early '00s.

I hope to get Jornada 720 or 680/690 if I can get it cheap.

ARM is now the de-facto standard, so yeah MIPS is left out of the market, but I heard RISC-V is gaining some share too. MIPS Open is now the open source MIPS processor it seems, but I just learned that now.

The Jornada 720 was the first one to use ARM. That's why I have this comparison in my mind, because the J720 is actually a lot snappier than the 680/690 running on MIPS processors. But they ran on lower clock speeds as well, so it wasn't a fair comparison. It would be nice to compare the same clock on the same OS.

The Sigmarion 2 runs at 200MHz with MIPS processor so clockspeed wise it isn't that different from Jornada 720. It will be interesting to run benchmark tests on both devices.

Check out this blog for comparison photo of Jornada 720 with Sigmarion 2. (not mine)

https://lancelot2.blog.ss-blog.jp/2014-09-15

Edited by stingraze 2020-10-05 4:42 PM

Not quite. Remember the 820?

And the 680 and 690 used the SH3 processor.

OMG, you're right. I tend to put SH3 and MIPS on the same "slow as crap" category, which makes it very easy for me to swap them on my mind. My bad... But in any case, given the architecture similarities of MIPS and ARM, I wonder how they compare when running the same OS on the same clock speed.



And about the 820...oh, I didn't know it ran on an ARM. That's interesting. I actually never had an 820. It is not my favorite form factor.

Interessting thread about performances of MIPS and (Strong)ARM.
So i would like to say something about that...now 1,5 years later

For many years I compare different HPCs with their architectures, OSs, components and stuff.
Especially for the comparison of the J720/728 and the SigmarionII I can say, the SigII is way more powerful than the J720 with its 206Mhz StrongARM CPU.
One reason for that would be the nearly same Clock Speed, while the SigII´s CPU has twice the BUS bandwidth of 64bit. So you can easily compare the SigII with an XScale Machine
with about 300Mhz.
Until today I still watch much video stuff on my HPCs, even full movies (in DivX and MPEG). For that I use the CorePlayer (TCPMP) under HPC2000 and CE 2.11.
The Jornada 720 is very good for watching clips. You can easily choose "high" resolutions up to 240p. But all Movie Formats are running significantly better on the SigmarionII.
And: The SigII has better screen, too. Its display has more crispiness and it is a so called "High Performance Adressing" Display -> HPA-DSTN. Not like TFT the pixels are active controlled, but
it has a better management in adressing the pixel....quasi "semi-active".
The Display an the unique 64bit MIPS VR4131 make the SigII already to a HighPerformer in the HPC2000 class. No other HPC ever made had this CPU (that´s why a comparison is so difficult to do).