A guide to running IRIX 6.5.22 in MAME

sgi.neocities.org

34 points·FlyMoreRockets··8 comments

Irix was my first Unix, I used it in a lab at school. It was wonderful and much better, at least from a visual point of view, than the other Unix flavors at the time. I learned X-Windows programming on it and really loved using it.

It's surprising the performance on modern hardware is so low. I would expect the GPU emulation to suffer, but not CPU.

I recall mips being pretty different, including being both-endian.

But there seems to be quite a number of mips emulators:

https://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Emulators

but I can't seem to find any perf numbers or capabilities (for example QEMU probably does just in time emulation, does mame/mess?)

MAME notoriously aims for accuracy over all else. In this case, I think it's just MAME using slow but precise "cycle accurate" emulation techniques as opposed to QEMU, which uses TCG to translate guest to host, and takes a few performance shortcuts.

Just speculating, though.

Indeed - they do The Right Thing. A dream of mine is to build a compiler that reads MAME code and spits out VHDL.

This is quite interesting. I do wonder if you can bootstrap Linux on it.

I expect you could. Then you could install Win3.1 running on DosBox. Or even a recursive MAME install...

This is not just interesting, but amazing!

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