[tyfighter]

I think the lack of a real usable emulator for SGIs is holding back any kind of homebrew. I say this as one of the developer's that got SGI Indy emulation working in MAME. Yes, it works, but it's too slow and too old to be usable. I spent some time after the MAME effort working on a custom high performance emulator for Crimson/Onyx/Reality Engine, but I've kind of burned out again. Maybe some day if I'm really driven again, and had help. I've done most of the reverse engineering already, it's just a lot of code.

I think that if a high performance, usable emulator for some of the big systems existed I think some of the old software might be rediscovered and show up on the internet.

[rngfnby]

I think the problem was that the machines were always very expensive, even used.

My Fuel has an SSD and Id use it daily except:

- It's loud

- It's single core

- It's a furnace

- It's very very loud

It has a fairly modern Emacs, ssh and a non distracting UX. The browser is the only real thing that is too old to be useful, feature and performance wise, but that's just bonus points productivity wise (besides, rdesktop into a modern machine and you can watch youtube)

If I had a 900 MHz O2 loaded with RAM, and an SSD (SCSI SSD, ha!) it'd probably be my daily driver.

[theodric]

I have a 600MHz RM7k O2, and my 700MHz R16k Fuel blows it out of the water. The O2 isn't that quiet or that quick even with upgrades!

What SSD are you running? I'm still on 10k SCSI drives selected for the quietness of their bearings.

[Aldipower]

Yes, I have a restored Indigo 2. I fixed at lot of things in the PSU.

And yes:

- It's loud

- It's single core

- It's a furnace

- It's very very loud

:-D

[ThatGuyRaion]

I keep my Challenge S running 24/7 :)

[ThatGuyRaion]

Your contributions to the Indy alongside Ryan's contributions were neat, truly. You plowed the road so others can navigate it. There's a rumor about a faster Indy emulator... but don't hold your breath yet. (Not a project I'm part of, but I've been told snippets)

The OS/hardware though, has serious limitations that while no problem for me, definitely pisses off people. Examples:

No atomics/Thread local support. Doesn't matter that someone ported GCC 15 -- you can't make use of many useful newer language features.

Immediate Mode OpenGL only. There's no direct hardware access. Not a problem for me, but every SGI out there is fixed function only. I've had people bitch to high hell we don't have shaders.

and in general, some people just think the OS is janky. I love it, but not everyone is me.

[Grosvenor]

> Not a problem for me, but every SGI out there is fixed function only.

Is that true? I remember sgi had a shader library for modeling light aimed at the automotive market. All the demos and examples were showing off car paint colours in different environments.

[Grosvenor]

They got the N64 running on the MiSTer. So an indy should be possible, they're closely related systems.

I'd love an Onyx/RE on an FPGA someday. Next to my FPGA cray.

[wk_end]

The CPUs are close, but the Indy is otherwise pretty different from the N64. Totally different graphics architecture, and - relevant to getting it on MiSTer - it’s a workstation rather than a video game console, necessitating quite a bit more complexity. I’d be really surprised if it could be squeezed on.

(Though, full disclosure, I said the same thing about the N64 before the core for it came out - the folks working on MiSTer are incredible.)