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.
What SSD are you running? I'm still on 10k SCSI drives selected for the quietness of their bearings.
It works great but I just use it for /opt since I ran out time to move more of the machine into it.
You cant boot off the SSD, so I still use a SCSI but you can replace that too if you boot the SGI off the network.
Silent SGI:
Having gotten rid of the SCSI drives completely w/ the network boot, you can put a modern, more silent, PSU [1] (but hurry, ones w/ enough current on 5V (?) are rare), and then replace the GPU and CPU fans and turn of environmental monitoring.
[1] i had to replace mine; my 500 MHz Fuel is notorious for bad psu
And yes:
- It's loud
- It's single core
- It's a furnace
- It's very very loud
:-D
I'd love an Onyx/RE on an FPGA someday. Next to my FPGA cray.
(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.)
I was always confused why sgi didn’t throw the rcp on a pci card and dominate the pc graphics market.
It does seem a little bit like an ultra-simplified, integrated version of the RealityEngine [0]. The RealityEngine had "6, 8, or 12 Geometry Engines" split out across three to six boards, each powered by an Intel i860XP, that then passed their work along to Fragment Generators. This roughly corresponds to the RSP, which was just another MIPS core (with vector/matrix extensions), passing its work along to the RDP on the N64. I'm not sure how programmable the RealityEngine's pipeline was compared to the surprisingly flexible RSP.
Remember, the constraints for a graphics workstation are really different than for a game console - especially on the low-end, totally different corners are going to be cut. An Indy still needed to be able to generate a high resolution display and allow modelling complex scenes for film and TV; but while some degree of real-time 3D was important, it was expected that artists could be modelling using wireframe or simplified displays. A game console was displaying low-resolution and relatively low-detail scenes, but they still wanted them to look aesthetically "complete" - shading, textures, fog, lighting, particles - while running at real-time speeds. SGI used their expertise and built something custom-fit for the job at hand, rather than just reusing an existing solution.
[0] https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ravir/274/15/papers/p109-akeley.pdf
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.
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.
IRIX only supports about OpenGL 1.2. It does have a fragment shading extension though:
https://tech-pubs.net/reputable-archive/fragment_lighting.tx...
http://nekonomicon.irixnet.org/ -- Nekochan backup
I'm working on some OpenGL stuff at least.
If you want OpenGL demos, well, they exist. An example I made: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4796.html
You want newer FOSS?
Every quarter I update it.