Build you own SGI Indy workstation with MAME | Hacker News Reader

Build you own SGI Indy workstation with MAME

sgi.neocities.org

86 pointsmarcodiego21 comments

From an Indy owner, for folks who may be interested:

* The Indy was meant to run IRIX 5.x. It does this pretty well with 64M of RAM, and really well with 128M or 256M installed.

* IRIX 6.5 was not designed with the Indy in mind, and, well, it's a miracle that it works at all. It does not work great.

* A real-life Indy, like I have in my study here at home, takes 3-5 minutes to boot IRIX 5.x, even with 256M of RAM installed. IRIX 6.5 can take a lot longer. early-1990s 2nd gen SCSI wasn't fast.

* Early-90s graphics demos meant for the Indy are often written with old-school GL, instead of OpenGL, and will not work with IRIX 6.5. As an example, the Jurassic Park images of "fsv" require IRIX 5.3 at latest, because that was the last revision to include the old-style GL software renderers.

The MAME emulation is genuinely very slow, but the original item was also not all that fast!

An R4000SC had literally 10x the compute capacity of a contemporary 486dx, but very similar memory and disk bandwidths. These systems were clippy by the standards of the day, but it all "feels" slow to a 2021 user.

rather than go through the headaches of installing irix 6.5 in an emulator, allow me to demonstrate the actual headaches of irix 6 on indy with this exciting textual simulation: (messages are recreated from memory, and may not be perfectly accurate, imagine logging in for the first time after a fresh installation)

indy% ls<enter>

objectserver exited with signal 11 (core dumped)

... ... <enter> ... (20s) ... <CTRL-C> ... <enter> ... ... (30s) <enter> ... <enter> ... <power off> ... <power on>

bum buh dum dum, tsh!

...in truth though, the indy was one of my favorite workstations (possibly edging out the next). i was lucky enough to first encounter an indy when i was an intern in the 90s. later after i was hired full-time i had an indy on my desk. software i worked on shipped to all indy and challenge owners on physical CDs as part of sgi's webforce suite! :)

It's shocking to be reminded of user interfaces where you can visually identify the controls and boundaries.

Yes, it's a really frustrating development that worsens usability. E.g. the Firefox url bar on MacOS became nearly invisible after the recent design change: no borders, 96% bright grey on 98% bright grey.

Don't worry, it's equally shit on Linux.

The part that stuck out to me was the thick border with _corner sections_ on each window. On all 3 operating systems (although less so on Windows) I have struggled to find the 1-3 pixel tiny window that allows me to manually resize a window so many times it's unbelievably frustrating. Having that massive target to grab makes me very wistful. I would happily give up 10ish pixels of screen real-estate on each side of my windows to never have to deal with that struggle again.

Wow, I guess we are polar opposites. I value every pixel of screen space I can have and loathe unnecessarily large UI elements that aren’t hideable.

I was immediately turned off from the GUI myself when I saw this.

Wow, I haven't seen one of those in.. nearly a quarter century now I guess?

At my first job out of college I had an Indy workstation. No hardware accelerated 3D, but relatively compact (for the time) and aesthetically pleasing too. An elegant machine for a more civilized age.

It's a UNIX system! I know this!

https://www.wired.com/2015/06/tech-time-warp-time-unix-saved...

Out of context (and arguably in-context), that's such a perfect and valid example of how hacking goes. Recognizing patterns, applying pre-existing knowledge and experience...

Makes me want to dig out my IRIS Indigo from storage and see if it'll still fire up. I bought it when they first came out to do a bunch of work with weather satellite imagery. It was hard to beat for image processing back then. But you paid dearly for it, and it didn't take long for graphics adapters on commodity PCs to overtake the whole line and crush SGI.

My Indigo2 made a fantastic desktop for quite some time, and then went off to London to become a CPAN Testers machine until it finally expired of old age and hard use.

A person I do some work for has some of these SGI Indy workstations and monitors sitting in storage somewhere. Pretty sure he would let them go if someone paid shipping cost (would not have hard drives but those are easy to get). If interested reply back or email me (note the email hack)

I should try to reboot mine. Too bad the R5000 inside failed, and I had to use a spare R4600 I had around: it's been dog slow since then.

Had many of those over the years - all I have left is the mouse pad :)

brings back memories. indigo2, 8 processor geometry engine, if i recall. my wife almost killed me.

Because of the price tag or what?

maybe fan noise ? ;)

i miss the look of their desktops ! and the purple colors of sun workstations :)

it was pretty solid; I owned one, I used it as my desktop for years.

brings back memories. indigo2. my wife almosted killed me.

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