ThatGuyRaion

You're welcome :)

Just in time. O2 RAM sticks are probably entering reproduction (but you didnt hear that from me :) )

Wanted to ensure it was clear lol.

It's a labor of love for me.

Greetings HN,

As the current Nekonomicon steward, taking over the project from Elf, I finally added a "new section".

Let me explain

Nekochan.net was a famous SGI site that went down on May 21st 2018. Remember the day like it was yesterday. I got up, went to a restaurant to get some food and people start bombarding me while I'm eating.

Anyways, in 2019 Elf, a user of IRIXNet, decided to grab the forum posts off archive.org and reformat them as the "Nekonomicon Book of Notes"

In 2020 I manually (2104 images!) grabbed the original images and metadata off nekochan's archive.org and put it on Silicon Image.

Well, Silicon Image is getting migrated soon to a new project I built using Laravel. As part of this, I built a static site generator in python to rebuild this into a Nekonomicon book of illustrations. After 2-3 days of rapid prototyping, I got it up and running here:

http://nekonomicon.irixnet.org/gallery/index.html

The tarball will be updated soon.

Future Nekonomicon updates might include:

1. Geoman and a few other community members ganked forum backups. I might be able to eventually merge and reconcile, but I suspect that will necessitate AI assistance.

2. The Nekochan.net blog. Mostly for nostalgia.

Anyways, enjoy the memory lane trip.

Do not turn off environmental monitoring. That's for debugging only. That's how people are cooking the video cards. Please get your fuel /properly/ repaired by say weblacky on irixnet. The reason why? With env monitoring off, the system won't respond to overheating on the graphics card and it'll cook it alive. The fuel has notoriously bad airflow (air doesn't move right angles)

SGIs that matter (MIPS, etc)

IRIX only supports about OpenGL 1.2. It does have a fragment shading extension though:

https://tech-pubs.net/reputable-archive/fragment_lighting.tx...

"We weep for the blood of a bird, but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those with a voice."

Applies here. SGI hardware holds interest because "ooh pretty animations/GL". IBM is great stuff, but it's all workhorses.

You could use the NVME driver to load the filesystem and boot the kernel diskless...

Ummmm...

https://irixnet.org/

http://nekonomicon.irixnet.org/ -- Nekochan backup

Nay, the N64 is pretty unique hardware-wise. Conceptually it's vaguely similar to the O2, the RCP is an R4000 fixed function CPU with some extra graphics instructions IIRC.

It runs like arse though.

I'm working on some OpenGL stuff at least.

I keep my Challenge S running 24/7 :)

Your contributions to the Indy alongside Ryan's contributions were neat, truly. You plowed the road so others can navigate it. There's a rumor about a faster Indy emulator... but don't hold your breath yet. (Not a project I'm part of, but I've been told snippets)

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.

Where do I start?

If you want OpenGL demos, well, they exist. An example I made: https://forums.irixnet.org/thread-4796.html

You want newer FOSS?

https://nekoware.me

Every quarter I update it.

Nice work Matt.

AFAICT Cloanto is milking Amiga, and Hyperion is actually updating OS 3.1/3.2 plus their OS 4 stuff.

I suppose that makes sense -- though SIMD seems more useful for accelerating a lot of crypto?

Question for those smarter than me: What is an application for an int128 type anyways? I've never personally needed it, and I laughed at RISC-V for emphasizing that early on rather than... standardizing packed SIMD.

A lot of good FOSS folks have died too soon. Joerg Schilling (cdrecord's author). He was a quirky, if genuinely talented fella.

Yes and no. Cloanto isn't like Bill McEwen's Amiga Inc., but it's litigious towards Hyperion and several others. They're not good people. Another greedy corporation milking the corpse of Commodore. Absolute... jerks. Trying to work on my language, but I'd love to call them worse.

OPENLOOK is nice overall

Maybe "Early System V"? but even still that's a stretched token.

AIs borrowing from other AIs. Who could've thought!?

Gracias for the testing. I appreciate it. I mostly run BSD and GNU/Linux at home.

> Do you plan to expand to other things that SGI produced? Publications? Swag?

I mean I wanna be able to document everything that I can that is within scope. As I told another user, I gotta have a solid "bread" around the "sandwich" so to speak.

SGI's trademarks are gone, but there's so many Chinese companies now selling that swag it's hard. I do got some mouse pads I made if you're in the US:

https://irixnet-sales.square.site

I wish I could get excited, but several design choices and aspects of the status quo we are facing have me worried:

It's already a basically bleeding edge C++. Why is it so much to ask for developers to use a more mature and established iteration so I don't need a brand new compiler?

What role is it gonna actually fill? It's not efficient enough to penetrate into the niche of Dillo or Netsurf. It's nowhere near as up to date on standards as Webkit, Goanna, Blink and Servo engines.

The swift move means LLVM-only. Yay. \s

What is supposed to sell this to normal users? Brave may be controversial, but its messaging is on point. Pale moon purging Mr. Tobin basically solved 99% of their brand issues. Vivaldi is what Opera used to be.

Google's dominance through Chromium/Chrome appears commanding. Between Pale Moon getting censored from Cloudflare sites, to Firefox becoming a controlled opposition, to Microsoft JOINING THEM. I'm sorry, but I have trouble being optimistic.

That said, I begrudgingly am ok with it. I wish they did things different.

Give. Me. Details. To. Replicate. Please.

Browser. Screenshot. URL. OS. I'm on Brave/ GNU/Linux and it works.

Well that's a "let's get details to replicate issue" Level problem. Clearly, images are supposed to load. Give me details to chew on. I mean, if you're on HN, you know better than to say "It's broken" level of detail.

Well, for me, it's just not feasible for me to take the gambles archive.org and others do. I am a professional locksmith in IRL, and "piracy" could lead me to losing my livelihood as my license could be revoked. I also have only so many hours in a day to keep stuff running. You think I need more mailboxes to be checked etc?

Plus, nowadays, dmca rightsholders will bypass you, going straight to the host provider who will lock you down for gods know how long until someone gets back to you.

I am not like Peter Plank, who ran nekochan.net. I have professional infrastructure,paid developers and a few sysadmins who help me run it all. It costs me nearly a grand a year to keep the lights on.

Is it worth the risk? Honestly, it's not! The only things I host are IRIX install media, and HPE moreorless said informally/noncommittally, "don't sell it and we're not gonna care!"