The collected works of Mare

My Indy was called Grub for some reason, bought it off ebay and thats the name it had, I liked it so when I reinstalled IRIX on it I kept the name.

But all the Future SGI boxes around here are part of the 'thing' label...

For example my octane is called Greenthing and Spookys Indigo 2 is called Purple thing. When I get round to it the Indy will be renamed Blue thing. :P

All the x86 boxes I have are called g0ats... for example Gameg0at, Netg0at and so on.

All our x86 servers are named after big planets like Ganymede and Nereid 8)


Quote:
my win2k box is named "WOPR"


WOPR as in the big supercomputer from Wargames yeah?
Hakimoto wrote:
Also... what frame rates can I expect on a 195 MHz Dual Octane with SI and half a gig RAM?


I wouldnt expect any good fps at all on that sady, its quite texture intensive and I dont think there is an option to turn it off. Maybe in newer versions they might have the option.

I tried it a while ago on a 150 R5k indy and it didnt move at all. I managed to remove the texture files and after lots of complaining I had a red screen with a speedo and a blue sky but atleast it appeared to be moving :P
I have a Gigabit Fiber network card in my Origin 200.

Quote:
IRIX64 GigaThing 6.5 6.5.22m 10070055 IP27


Hinv reconises it as :
Quote:
Gigabit Ethernet: eg0, module 1, PCI slot 5, firmware version 0.0.0


Here is a picture of it :
http://www.nekochan.net/gallery/album16 ... workcard01

Part number : 9210129

I am not actually using it as I dont have any other systems with fiber network cards though I am tempted if the costs arent too much. If you have any commands I can run on the card for more info just let me know :) [/quote]
...if TRAM is added it becomes equivalent to an MXI graphics system.


Just a note, it actually becomes an MXI. Thats all MXI's are SSI + 2xTRAM.

The only problem with going for an SSI or SSE is that if you want textures you will have to track down the two TRAM modules, which are starting to get rare again on ebay. So the cost of the SSI plus the cost of getting two TRAM modules could get quite expensive. What you might find to be a better solution is to wait for a MXI/E to appear on ebay on its own and bid for that.

Is SSI better then ESI?

Well I have an MXI and an ESI in my Octane and just running the Powerflip demo from the icon catalog here are the results...

MXI - fullscreen 1280x1024 @ 75hz : 75FPS constant.
ESI - fullscreen 1280x1024 @ 75hz : 37-43FPS up and down.

Twice the geometry engines are gooood :D
Very cool find!

Just had a good play with them, its a shame they dont have the other games from the bottom, would be cool to have a simple pool/snooker game for my Octane. Night Stalker is definatly worth checking out at least, it has a great old Robocop feel to it :o

note that the 'Wild' game link seems to be broke, the real path is:

http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/course ... ild.tar.gz

They tried to link to wilt.tar.gz :oops:
I think you can best sum up your friends comments to the usual ramblings of a fanboy. So what if someone choses to use one graphics library over another, the important factor is what you end up with. I dont think I have ever heard any reviewere or end users giving the reason for a game/application sucking because it uses one API over another.

The choice of the API is usually down to capability, DirectX is now apparently a very nice set of libraries that are easy to program for and with a company such as Microsoft putting a lot of weight behind it, it does make a lot of sense to find out if it does what you need. OpenGL in the past has always been generally considered faster as OpenGL support in hardware has always been strong but in the 'fast' pc world of games the hardware technology seems to be driven by DirectX, new cards are out every 6 months with the lastest and greatest DirectX features in hardware.

What amazes me is that with all this computational power they still cant manage to improve physics technology past being able to run faster when running diagonally and jumping constantly. Instead it is being spent on making a lensflare look nicer when apparently looking through a 'persons' eyes. When was the last time you looked at the sun and thought "oh what a loverly lens effect"? 8)

Fanboys are everywhere and everyone has something they favour over another, just some are so passionate about it they believe its their reason in life to convince others that their believe is better. OpenGL, DirectX, AMD, Intel, SGI, Sun, Nvidia, ATI, Quake, Unreal, Halflife.. blah blah, the list is endless. Who cares if in the end if it does what you want?

Its a graphics API not a way of life.

/rant


I had a look at this a good few months ago but I ran into some compiling problems, I might give it a try again now I have some more experiance with compiling. Cheers for the reminder :)
Just thought I would leave a post in here detailing getting 3 heads running on an Octane, hopefully save someone a few hours of googleing :)

The config I have for this at the moment is :

Graphics board: SSI
Graphics board: ESI
Graphics board: ESI

I have 1 21" screen in the middle (SSI) and two 17" screens (SE) either side.

First off the PROM will only show that there are 2 of your graphics cards running, dont panic as Irix will happily see all 3 but not straight away.

When Irix first boots only the first two cards will be running, which combined with the only seeing 2 cards in the PROM makes it look like something is wrong but I remembed a post on the news groups by a German SGI Engineeer saying that only 2 cards show in the prom on his triple headed beast. A quick check of the HINV in Irix and all three are infact there.

Edit your Xservers file (/var/X11/xdm/Xservers) and add the following :

:0 secure /usr/bin/X11/X :0 -boards 0,1 ,2 -devdir /dev/input -bs -nobitscale -depth 24 -class TrueColor -c -solidroot sgilightblue -cursorFG red -cursorBG white

,2 - on the -boards part. This was easy to quess, then restart your xserver (vulcan death grip [ ctrl+shift+/+F12 ] and all three screens will come up eventually.

The next problem I came across was the second SE was on the right of the first SE but I wanted it to the left of the main screen.

Currently...

Code: Select all

|-------|
|       |----|----|
|  SSI  | SE | SE |
|_______|----|----|

but I want it as...

Code: Select all

|-------|
|----|       |----|
| SE |  SSI  | SE |
|----|_______|----|


Which required a good bit of googling and a look in man xdm. Turns out it is as simple as :

-hw board=0,right=1,left=2 -hw board=1,left=0 -hw board=2,right=0

In the Xservers file at the end of the main line. The way it works is you specify which board ID is left/right of the ID you are editing.
For example Board 0 (SSI) has Board 1 (SE) on the right and Board 2 (2nd SE) on the left.

-hw board=0,right=1,left=2

Do that for each board and you are laughing :)

Put all that in and restart the Xserver again and there you go, 3 screens on 1 Octane. Here is my full Xservers file.

Code: Select all

:0 secure /usr/bin/X11/X :0 -boards 0,1,2 -devdir /dev/input -bs -nobitscale -depth 24 -class TrueColor -c -solidroot sgilightblue -cursorFG red -cursorBG white -hw board=0,right=1,left=2 -hw board=1,left=0 -hw board=2,right=0
Brombear wrote: Don't forget to invest into a pretty decent audio system to drown the sound of the octane's fans at high speed ;-)


The noise level of the fastfan doesnt really bother me, I have always run in dual head with dual cpus. Besides I am used to being surrounded by servers but at our new office I have another Octane to my left, an Indigo 2 to the right and a Gigachannel O200 sat on a small cab with 4 x86 servers in it. The room is still quieter then our last place :D

I havent had much time to spend on the 3head beast yet but so far its pretty awesome, more desktop then I know what to do. I tried Xinerama for a few minutes but it wasnt too impressed, all the mouse events for the middle screen were translated to the left screen, very odd.

There will be pictures of the setup once we are settled in.
squeen wrote: An alternative to Xinerama is Opengl Multipipe (which has the older sgi-Xinerama bundle in it as well). Take a look at the documentation regarding the differences.


I didnt think OpenGL Multipipe worked on MGRAS cards, I thought it was for VPRO only?
It wouldnt happen to have the 747watt Cherokee power supply would it? mine makes the same sizzling noise when the system is off and so does both my O200 towers.
Sorry but am I the only one who thinks these post bars and titles are a bad idea?

I have seen many boards/forums that have ratings/titles/progress information for users and all they ever achieve is an increase in spam and pointless threads. I like the fact that there is a low amount of useless posts on nekochan and the Mods do a fantastic job at stopping cross posting and suspect threads from staying up too long.

But surely the introduction of these progress bars are just going to tempt people into posting for the sake of their profiles numbers.

There was a forum I used to visit a while back that had a massive problem with spam replies of nothing other than emoicons or quoting the above poster without adding anything. The fixed the problem by removing post counts and post level titles.

As usual its Nekos board and he can run it how he wants but do any these 'ohh my post count is higher' features of the phpBB really contribute to the usage of the board? The current back log of posts serve as an awesome collection of information for visitors.

Meh, just my oppinion 8)
joerg wrote: Mare, do you have a urgent need for it?


Nice work, no I am not in any rush for it. Honestly its not actually much use to me but I know a lot of people here use rendering apps that could take advantage of it?

Seems like a nice app. I would probably have a fiddle with it for a few days though.

Really should get round to relearning how to use blender :)
stuart wrote: If someone really fancies a challenge, id Software have just released the full Quake III Source code under the GPL


I had a quick crack at this today, there is actually an IRIX target in the Makefiles and there is a lot of code in there directly for IRIX (including threading support). Looks like the Makefile doesnt correctly detect that uname reports 'irix64' and all the ifdefs look for 'irix'.

Also the code apparently 'requires' gcc so I am sure that will be fun ;)
foetz wrote:
miunk wrote: Be careful /w nedit. I built an entire website using it, and once I deployed it I discovered that the encoding was not compatible with google's spider. So the google description was all jumbled and messy. They have since removed the site from their index, and have ignored my request to reinstate it.


that's strange. i used nedit for years as my primary editor and never had any issues.


Same here, I don't know where I would be without my NEdit and highlighting .pats files. I use it for everything! :?
If you are running PCP you can use the command pmdumptext..

This is the default output:

Code: Select all

[ 1] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.idle["cpu0"]
[ 2] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.wait.total["cpu0"]
[ 3] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.intr["cpu0"]
[ 4] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.sys["cpu0"]
[ 5] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.user["cpu0"]
[ 6] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.idle["cpu1"]
[ 7] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.wait.total["cpu1"]
[ 8] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.intr["cpu1"]
[ 9] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.sys["cpu1"]
[10] BlueThing:kernel.percpu.cpu.user["cpu1"]

Column          1       2       3       4       5       6       7      8       9      10
Source     BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh  BlueTh
Metric       idle   total    intr     sys    user    idle   total   intr     sys    user
Inst       cpu0    cpu0    cpu0    cpu0    cpu0    cpu1    cpu1   cpu1    cpu1    cpu1
Normal       0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   0.00    0.00    0.00
Units       util    util    util    util    util    util    util   util    util    util
Wed Jan  4 17:09:53      0.84    0.00    0.02    0.07    0.07    0.97    0.00    0.00    0.02    0.01
Wed Jan  4 17:09:55      0.87    0.00    0.00    0.04    0.08    0.97    0.00    0.00    0.00    0.02
Wed Jan  4 17:09:57      0.87    0.00    0.02    0.04    0.06    0.94    0.00    0.00    0.02    0.03


From the man page I think it looks pretty configurable :

NAME
pmdumptext - performance metrics dump to an ASCII table

SYNOPSIS
pmdumptext [-CFgHilmMNoruz] [-A align] [-a archive[,archive,...]] [-c
config] [-d delimiter] [-f format] [-h host] [-n pmnsfile] [-O offset]
[-P precision] [-R lines] [-s sample] [-S starttime] [-t interval] [-T
endtime] [-U string] [-w width] [-Z timezone] [metric ...]

DESCRIPTION
pmdumptext outputs the values of performance metrics collected live or
from a Performance Co-Pilot (PCP(1)) archive. By default, the metric
values are displayed in tab separated columns, prefixed by a timestamp.

[......]
Congrats dexter1!
NEdit 5.5 does everything I could possibly need for webdev. Syntax highlighting, multi-tabs, macroing, smart indenting, performance and above all stability.

I recently found out there is also support for 'calltabs' which are basically like some newer editors that show a tooltip of the function/code you are currently highlighting to check the syntax but thankfully its very unintrusive (press a button combo and it pops up).
Just to revive this old beast...

I have been getting DOSBOX 0.65 building. With the help of this thread I have got it built and here is my findings.

Keymap doesnt work without having the following set in your dosbox.conf file (must be in same dir as the dosbox binary) :
Code:
[sdl]
usescancodes=false

From what I can tell there are some issues with the command line parsing. Here is the really weird bit, if I put a printf("moo\n"); in the " class MOUNT : public Program " section it actually runs all the commands (INTRO / MOUNT / etc). Without the printf() it just prints a blank line and returns to the 'dos' prompt.

Putting that randomness aside for the moment from what I can tell it doesn't seem to thing there is anything else after the first command. For example if I put in 'mount c /dosbox' it will show the mounted drives (the same as if you just type 'mount' on its own).

I am going to run it through cvd and see what I can work out. This was build using MIPSpro Compilers: Version 7.4.3m
Quote:
Exit to error: Can't init SDL SDL not built with joystick support


Try uncommenting //#define DISABLE_JOYSTICK in src/gui/sdlmain.cpp:46, I would have thought there would have been a configure arg for disabling that.
Ok, this is getting really freaky now. I put some debugging printf's in some other places to track some more things but that stopped it 'running' the commands, now that I have taken them back out I can't get them to work again. To be honest I have no idea whats going on now.

I'll keep fiddling though, maybe its some kind of weird optimisation 'bug' causing it to not work.

I wish I had kept that binary that at least ran the commands :roll:
I could be persuaded to part with my Indy for the right price. :wink:

The Hinv is here - http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?t=9107 .

It would have to be collected from Portsmouth though as I wouldn't feel comfortable shipping it.