alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
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.