Це відео не доступне.
Перепрошуємо.
Inside MAME's SGI Indy emulation: A test-drive of SGI IRIX
Вставка
- Опубліковано 3 сер 2024
- SGI enthusiasts have been wanting SGI emulation for years.
It went totally unnoticed by myself, but MAME, formerly known as the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator, added emulation support for SGI workstations in 2019.
Albeit I wanted to look into running SoftWindows 95 on IRIX, I ended up venturing into SGI emulation, for the simple reason to check compability between both IRIX 5.3 and an older SoftWindows package.
So reason enough for a closer look on a test-drive of SGI's own UNIX-variant, IRIX, and MAME's SGI MIPS emulation.
00:00 Intro
00:36 A slow System as a Motivation
02:00 SGI Emulation in MAME
03:49 Making it Work
07:24 Installing IRIX into MAME
11:49 A sneak peek at SoftWindows
13:07 Motivating "inst" to install
14:54 Going Back to Real Hardware
18:48 Conclusion
20:30 Credits
MAME SGI Emulation Tutorial:
sites.google.com/site/console...
Patching MAME to overcome hard-coded Emulation Mem-limit:
forums.irixnet.org/thread-187...
SGI IRIX downloads:
jrra.zone/sgi/#pg-7
Hardening SGI IRIX:
www.giac.org/paper/gsec/4374/...
Visit also THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR website at phintage.phunsites.net for insights into my retro computer collection.
Copyright @ 2023 THE PHINTAGE COLLECTOR, Gianpaolo Del Matto. All rights reserved.
Theme Music composed by Abdallah El-Ghannam.
www.fiverr.com/abdallahghannam
SGI computers were used back in the days for several Hollywood movies like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, The Matrix and many more. And now we are emulating them on consumer grade hardware.
"It's a UNIX system. I know this." ;)
MAME’s ability to do computer emulation seems pretty under-appreciated and reported upon so don’t be surprised you hadn’t heard of it. Personally I’ve been watching the Mac II support that’s slowly been growing within it and the only reason I know about it is because I was reading the change log.
I used it quite a bit when it still was a separate project (MESS) that used the MAME core to emulate many different non-arcade machines. In 2015 it got merged into the main MAME.
I'm overly happy, there is finally something, that does SGI MIPS emulation. I was about time.
Sadly it can be quite unintuitive to use too. Every time I want to try it after not using for a while I have to grapple and Google and grumble until I figure it out again.
It's funny when I use the 386 AT emulation there is a splash screen that says it doesn't work but then it does work.
The blue pizza box. Bring so many memories of my early Softimage animator career.
Softimage ... bought and killed by Autodesk.
This brings back memories. The SGI startup sound! I used the Indy when I was at university and I really liked it even it was slow AF. But I also had access to the Indigo 2 which was really in a different class.
My first Unix workstation experience was an SGI 4D/70 GT superworkstation at NASA GSFC and in the 80s. Yes, the product literature called it a superworkstation. Also I was part of the CSC SMC RFP where Insignia developers pulled overnight shifts working on SoftPC.
The kick ass start-up sound on the Indy was always a crowd pleaser when somebody visited and never saw one before. PC's beep, Mac's chime, SGI...hold my beer.
Very cool to see irix in action!
The SGI startup sound... Oh how I've missed that!
I used to own not 2 but the SGI Indy's and a single SGI Indigo2. I got rid of them a long time ago, but every now and then I have moments of regret...
Btw... The SGI Iris GUI (including 4dwm) was reimplemented from scratch a couple of years ago as the MAXX desktop environment with the 5dwm window manager. It was a great experience!
I still have the original Irix 5.3 install CDs and I have images of the 6.2 and 6.5 installation CDs.
As for the performance of Irix 6.5 on SGI Indy's. If you have an R5K, it is mainly a matter of RAM. IRIX 6.2 should run without issue though.
Yes, mine is an R5K @150 MHz and 256 MiB ofRAM. It ran 6.5.22 before, and I always thought it was OK, but 5.3 is definitely more leightweight and makes the Indy feel more responsive.
I tried this a couple of years ago and was surprised how well it worked, it was very slow but it seemed like a good start and I have been meaning to revisit it to see if the clever people at MAME have managed to get it working at a more usable speed.
According to what I read, they added a just-in-time compiler, which improved the performance. From my own experience, speed was quiet decent.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR As the author of the Indy driver in MAME, I'm on the fence as to how reliable (or rather, unreliable) the JIT is. Contributor "Patrick Mackinlay" - or as I like to call him, P-Mack - found an issue in the JIT that was also preventing the Jazz driver from booting the MIPS port of Windows NT, and according to him, that fix also made IRIX installable while using the JIT core. However, I can't shake the feeling that it's a bit less stable than the pure interpreter, so your mileage may vary.
And for what it's worth, I'm gradually poking away at an O2 driver, although I'm keenly aware that it's unlikely to run anywhere approaching full speed, not without a lot of get-out-and-push, at least.
@@mogemulation cool, thx for the insights! I‘ll be continuing to play around with it, as I want to deep-dive the networking support.
I‘m deeply impressed though with what I‘ve seen so far!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORhave you had any luck with getting networking to work with mame?
I love my IRIX systems. Hope this brings more people to the hobby.
SGIs always been quite sensive to correct termination on the SCSI bus. I will try to find some pictures from my trips to Silicon Studio in London. Recall they had an old Cray sitting in the reception. Used to go there quite often for seminars and product training. Great atmosphere and some very skilled technicians around in that time.
@talbech The only Cray I've ever seen was in the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. That thing is ginormous!
Btw, I had revisited the issue about the Indy and the SCSI drive in ua-cam.com/video/uP4zM4YsnzA/v-deo.html
It turned out to be the drive itself, being a CD-Writer, causing these issues.
On the real hardware, IP22, in the PROM, hinv will report the raw clock frequency without the multiplier. A "50Mhz" IP22 R4x00 is actually running at 100Mhz when fully booted.
Awesome video! I just found yer channel, but I’ll be back!!
Interesting. I have an actual Indy with the basic graphics card, CPU and RAM, but minus a suitable video cable and hard disk. The Clock chip's battery had gone too, and I got most of the way into scraping it from the packaging, but not yet replacing it with a new one. What Mac were you using - just so that other readers can determine the performance of their emulated Indys? (I have seen the info about the JIT compiler).
Zeit für eine Indy! (Is what was printed on a mouse pad i used to use)
I would keep an eye out for a 180MHz R5000 CPU card; those can be easily overclocked to 200MHz with just a crystal swap.
Your previous comment disappeared, mine is a 150 MHz R5k.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yeah I edited it once I saw the readout.
IRIX is UNIX and GhostBSD is a GUI based UNIX based on the open Berkeley Software Distribution FreeBSD.
I used to work for SGI. Softwindows was super hard to get a license for, even then. However, it would be tied to the MAC address so if you can find one anywhere, you should be able to make the address work.
As I recall, it only supported win16 apps, and it was pretty damn slow. Insignia was actually surrounded by SGI buildings in Mountain View, which always struck me as funny.
Check out my second video about SoftWindows…
ua-cam.com/video/FRzQwq-P3gU/v-deo.htmlsi=UDslZ8exZCXg3ITE
SoftWindows 2.0 was coming with Windows 3.1 (so yes, 16-bit apps only).
SoftWindows95 4.0 and 5.0 for SGI Irix had Windows 95, so 32-bit appd were just fine.
Though that one needs something like an Octane with a 400 MHz CPU to have somewhat reasoanble speed.
Your English dialect is excellent
Thx :)
Agreed
Wow i just put one of those machines in surplus a few days ago.
13:00
there is no dist folder?
make you have to "make" something? or put an cd and it will mount the folder?
@igorgiuseppe1862
Nope, as this is a binary distribution. And it's really as I'm telling in the video. The install script refers to a *dist* folder, where there in fact is none. The folder in question to install the software on SGI IRIX is the one called *sgi*. I believe, it's just a misalignment, that the script is not paying proper tribute to what the folder was actually called on the CD-ROM.
A couple years ago my work was going to scrap an SGI O2, I asked and they let me take it and the monitor. I did some upgrades to it like put in a faster processor, more ram and a bigger drive that had a bunch of software already installed.
This is how I got my original Indy, the O2 and the Indigo 2. Unfortunely, I sold all of them off. The systems I have today are unfortunately not the original ones I had, lest to say, not the Indy I learned a lot about UNIX back in the days.
A SGi Indy. Unbefeckinleaveble. Had one in the late 1990's. Was a cute box until the bloody camera packed up...
Ime abit confused watching your video.
you run through mame and it says its 100mhz setup and in your video it shows 50 mhz cpu
but about 15 minutes in, the cpu in your hinv suddenly change to 150 mhz
how did that happen. and do you acualy feel any difference in the performance of the emulation
from what ever you changed there ?
i notised at the list you make at 9:40 it shows cpufreq=50,
is that the one you changed or was that from the real indy machine you did install on
No worries!
The 150 MHz R5000 shown at around 15:00 is a real Indy machine.
The 100 MHz clock shown in the MAME configuration is for the emulated R4600 Indy.
For reasons, this 100 MHz configuration for the emulared Indy is shown as a 50 Mhz clock in HINV/PROM.
Someone else commented, that this discrepancy for showing the clock at 50 MHz (so half the speed) in the PROM of the emulated Indy seems to be by design.
Why UA-cam doesnt attract attention to your channel? IDK but good video :)
Thanks :-)
Sometimes, YT does attract attention to my videos, but it's rather rare for obvious reasons,
as I'm just a 1-man-show, and I'm not chasing after trending/What's hot topics on YT,
and not keeping the pace to compete with the big channels.
Plus my story-telling is rather ad-hoc. Not totally unplanned, but I don't have several weeks
of pre-production buffer.
Hence I'm starting different topics at a time, pursuining them, while bringing the stories
of a series out-of-sequence.
I'm trying to avoid this, but with a just-in-time production, and the fact that I sometimes need
to wait to find certain spare parts, it is, what it is.
It definitely hurts the channel, as I see the drop out of subscribers whenever I'm not bringing the follow-up
to the kicked-of video series.
Apart from that I've been focussing on restorations and repairs for the most so far.
These type of videos in my experience attract far less viewers than explorative videos,
of which I've done a few, like the SGI IRIX / MAME emulation, XENIX, or some CP/M related videos.
The latter worked really well and boosted the channel each time.
They're fun as well, but also a lot harder to do, as they take a lot more time than the "fixing and getting back up and running"-ones.
These and a few other factors sum up to viewers satisfaction, on which the YT algorithm is based.
I know some areas where to improve. At the time, I'm focussing on establishing a pre-production buffer, so my video releases will eventually stay more on point and sequence.
Thanks anyway for your comment. I'm happy for having you follow the channel :-)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I think you can pin other channels on your chnanel for gaining time and view time in long run, you can pin Action Retro, Lazy Game Reviews, This Does Not Compute and other youtube channels. This will make your viewers will not find other youtube channels and sticking into them and forgetting yours.Inshallah you will be professional in your youtube channel ameen.
How's the performance? Any good to run an old copy of Softimage?
@zilog1 I didn't try that myself, so I'm unable to say how far the emulation goes for using the hardware support. In the end, all would be emulated, so if SoftImage runs, then it's propably not too fast after all.
I ran the emulation on a 2015 iMac, and I'd say I got maybe half the performance of the original Indy. Though to support this with facts rather than stomach feeling, I'd need to do an actual benchmark.
Try the command "inst ." once you change to a directory.
you should really run your Indy with IRIX 5.3, it runs much much better (at least in my experience). The 6.x releases are fine for the more powerful machines (O2, Octane, etc.) but on Indy, I'm running the more stable and faster 5.3
Fully agree. Didn't venture into too much yet, but when I rebootet my Indy on 5.3, it felt so much more reponsive than with 6.5.22, that I'll defintely keep it on 5.3.
I know this is a real late comment but, Can you run the mame version efficiently enough to perform Maya or lightwave 3D modeling and rendering?
Well, for me it felt a bit sluggisch, and performancewise (I didn't do a benchmark, more like perception on use and feel) like half the speed of an Indy.
Though I didn't test any real world applications like Maya. I believe these applications would certainly run with the emulation, unless there's issues with FlexLM.
I had troubles getting FlexLM to work in the emulation, so I don't have specific expirience for Maya or lighwave.
However, given the nature of the emulation, I would asume "running" is not equal to "it's running faster" or even on par to the speed of a real Indy.
I didn't venture into that area, so in the worst case the emulation would be just slow when it comes to graphics rendering.
Thank you very much. @@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR
@@valentine_puppy you‘re welcome
Hopefully it will work on m1/m2 macs
Does he say what Mac he did run the emulation on?
10:11 No journalling filesystems in those days ...
Yes and no. IRIX 5 didn't have one in the beginning, though with 5.3, XFS appeared, and while still in BETA at the time, it provided journaling support.
I suspect that SGI emulation was simply a by-product of MAME/MESS developers having to implement support for game consoles that used MIPS CPUs and hence that's why it feels half-baked, so to speak, and with weird limitations such as hard coded fixed amounts of RAM so to me it is impressive that it worked AT ALL.
What should I do if I'm on Windows?
MAME also runs on Windows …
So is there any difference in windows?
I'm anxious because you are on a mac.
@@okokemalhi MAME provides same
Functions, wether you run it on Windows, Mac or Linux doesn‘t matter for the most.
There is some variations, i.e. how to configure networking. But for the most, it‘s the same.
And for the emulation itself, it‘s irrelevant, as that‘s abstracted.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR thank you
Qemu?
Für Jahren suchte ich nach einem Messgerät für meine Parras.
The Indy was an Indygo without the 'go'