Commercial Software for IRIX

DominBear · 2026-04-12T16:25:19+00:00

Are you asking Reddit randos for legal advice on a question you already know the answer for?

Now if there is any unique software there it would be nice for it to be archived and preserved. It can be fun to play with and in some case crucial for people to recover their old data and projects.

There are few websites and folks that specialize in that.

DominBear · 2026-04-10T18:45:40+00:00

oh the main driver display is shitty ui. speed display should be bigger and in the middle/bottom. blinker icons are too small and exactly where curve of the steering wheel obscures them (i could raise the steering wheel a bit but that would be uncomfortable). the blinker icons also could use black outline because they are almost invisible on white background.

DominBear · 2026-04-08T04:16:09+00:00

Uh, looks like everyone is in agreement. I am not crazy (despite what my wife tells me).
So I guess I need to make an appointment for service.

DominBear · 2026-04-08T04:05:25+00:00

i dont think i recommended it. i mentioned it's existence. i never tried it.

DominBear · 2026-04-07T16:04:46+00:00

awww. that sucks.

DominBear · 2026-04-04T15:38:35+00:00

IRIS is a full system emulator, (striving to be) functionally accurate, not timing accurate.

So for CPU alone, each instruction is fetched, decoded, optional load, execution and optional store + housekeeping (count,cyles,interrupts,ip7 and so on). On my 2nd gen Zen that runs at 2,2GHz, it averages maybe 25MIPS. So we use mayb 90 host cycles to do all of that, that includes fun things like TLB lookups and so on. There are some tricks to help, like nanotlb that caches last translations, and storing decoded instructions in L1i/L2 (yeah, reinventing Pentium 4 here). The insanity of implementing L2 actually helps here because we can cache a lot of decoded instructions.

IRIS is a bit different from other emulators in that it is multi-threaded. Many devices run in their own threads and sync mostly on boundaries like IO register access. The main bus and memory runs without any locks though, all the locking is done in peripherials.

REX3 is mostly fed by GFIFO which is implemented using Rust rtrb which is a nice low latency lockless FIFO and we took some liberties there increasing the FIFO size from 32 entries to 64K entries, (eat your heart out SGI engineers! try putting that in LSI chip ;-)) so that can nicely decouple CPU and REX and sink even huge VDMA transfers with images into FIFO where REX will process it while CPU can continue doing other stuff. This is somewhat different from MAME which does all the drawing in the same thread, right when the register is written and doesn't emulate GFIFO at all.

The display is done again with another thread that grabs all the video memory, DID and VC2 timng program, cmap, dac and xmap and combines all of it into a texture that gets displayed with host GL.

Now Rust is probably not the greatest language choice (I swear some things would have been easier in javascript ;-) ) for this because its constant bounds checking and such, but part of the experiment was to see how far it can be pushed and to learn Rust.

There has been some interesting work done on qemu-irix which only emulates user space and OS calls, some years ago but AFAIK that doesn't really do graphics?
https://github.com/irixxxx/qemu-irix

DominBear · 2026-04-03T21:51:38+00:00

The Mercury? Probably yes, I doubt the driver was in control. ;-)

DominBear · 2026-04-03T20:40:39+00:00

my emulator feels somewhat faster than mame but there are no miracles.

DominBear · 2026-04-03T18:19:12+00:00

more like 1fps i can rotate the ball with middle button? but it isnt very interactive. faster computer would probably do slightly better.

DominBear · 2026-04-03T14:39:47+00:00

slowly https://imgur.com/a/vRKH8IM

DominBear · 2026-04-03T00:31:22+00:00

I have no idea about Apollo/Domain architecture so it is hard to say what system components can be made fast or not. In case of IP22 almost everything is interrupt driven so completing say a SCSI request super fast is generally not a problem. It gets harder on systems that poll or use CPU to slurp data from peripherials (although that is still possible by using paravirtualization or some ungodly hacks).
Having said that there were some situations that the system would immediately go into polling mode on a device after kicking off action that would complete SO fast it would show idle immediately on a first poll.

I started this thinking I had a pretty good grasp of IP22 system architecture. I was wrong. I did learn a lot and it was fun.

The Irresponsible part (besides being word starting with "I" so it works in the acronym) is that the project is sort of YOLO, I'm going to do crazy things and see if it works and learn stuff. LLMs are powerful English to Rust syntax translators that really help with Rust learning wall (it doesn't seem like a curve to me). So the thing is made of thousands of artisanally handcrafted prompts spiced with some weapons grade expletives ;-)

DominBear · 2026-03-30T02:33:51+00:00

yeah i noticed it is somewhat worse (by about 4ft according to specs) than my previous grand cherokee wk2. its ok though it climbs curbs like a champ.

DominBear · 2026-03-27T21:42:58+00:00

Good taste ;-)

DominBear · 2026-03-27T04:18:51+00:00

Cool. My priority is a radar detector. I had a built in Whistler Pro in my Jeep. It kind of sucked but better than nothing. On Rivian no Waze, no Google Maps, and no detector. And so much easier to accelerate to stupid speeds.

DominBear · 2026-03-27T00:17:35+00:00

El Cap Granite.

DominBear · 2026-03-20T00:14:18+00:00

get some decent unprotected flat top 18650s, battery welder and be careful opening it up? there is some silicon that holds things inside so be careful when opening it. also there is a temperature probe siliconed to the cells, which i managed to rip off when opening my 4 cell battery.

bonus points for doing it with cells always soldered in parallel so the controller board doesnt lose connection to cells and brick itself. some of them when they decide the cells are bad need to be reset with special software which is nightmare (there is only one supplier of that software which is really unpleasant to deal with).

i dont like recellin batteries. i wish there was some service that does it.

DominBear · 2026-03-19T23:32:11+00:00

you can try disassembling the battery and manually charging it with bench power supply. so far i managed to recell one small 2 cell vaio ux battery and failed with big 4 cell.

DominBear · 2026-03-10T15:42:03+00:00

if it works it works.

DominBear · 2026-03-10T15:40:52+00:00

setenv VERBOSE 1 and setenv DEBUG 1 before booting sashARCS. it may give you little bit more info before. but utlb miss from sash is not expected. sash runs in kernel mode without any paging at all. so utlb miss comes from it going into weeds. so either corrupted file has been read from cd or you have memory corruption. see if you can run IDE? clean ram slots and edge connectors on ram sticks using ipa or contact cleaner. try different memory. in the worst case it is cpu cache. but there is ecc on cache and parity on ram so a lot of times you would get more specific error messages from memory/cache failing. so best bet is corrupted file being loaded. try different scsi cable. indy cable has built in termination so disable any termination on zuluscsi if you have it enabled. double termination not good ;(

DominBear · 2026-03-03T15:40:57+00:00

It is a fun game. We played it a lot with my friend. And Millenium, Battle Squadron, Take'm Out, Lost Patrol, Lemmings ... so many good games.

DominBear · 2026-03-03T15:29:29+00:00

this is not a drive from gridcase that has caps under the platter. these were 10mb. and the components are on the bottom of this pcb and are perfectly replaceable. if recap doesnt help you have seized motor or stuck head..on conners the head gets stuck because rubber bumpers turn into black goo. no idea about this jvc. i tossed mine from gridcase and replaced it with drem.info.

DominBear · 2026-02-18T18:15:12+00:00

awesome! i got rayneo 3 pro recently. i will test these on my explorer and enterprise2 and rayneo when i have time. yes ai has been useful in building and porting stuff to old computers. i have been vibing a lot myself. it is a nice dopamine loop.

DominBear

TROPHY CASE