[Raion]

DrShuppet,

Thank you for your questions and post.

I will answer what I can but as a reminder, as the spokesperson involved with this my main goal is to ensure that I provide correct and accurate information to the best of my ability and at the same time protect the people who have trusted me with identifying information.

Because of that I can't exactly reveal how many people are involved in the team but I can tell you that it is more than a few. My primary role besides acting as the public face of the team is to help direct priorities and act as the intermediary between divisions in the team.

The timeline is a best estimate based on the estimated number of lines of code that are involved in the project and on estimates from people who have undertaken similar projects. These are subject to change of course but we have an obligation to provide some type of a ballpark up front.

We have a sort of road map and timeline that we are planning to try to adhere to, and to ensure trust it'll be my job to provide preliminary forms of documentation that come out as a result of our study. I'm also one of the few technical writers involved with the group so my job is to ensure that we have uniform clarity throughout the writing and ensure that the final published specifications and references (potentially including charts, graphics and such) are of the same quality.

> Are you going to improve the kernel once you have reverse engineered it?

Without specifically making promises we can't keep I would very much like to explore us documenting potential serious bugs that we will mark down as todos with what to fix. As far as changing things like the internal scheduler and such that really just depends upon our priorities once our original goals are met. If there's a demand for it and the team members are up for it I am more than happy to continue facilitating cooperation.

> What do you expect to get from reverse engineering the IRIX 5.3 kernel?

I'm not sure if you read the articles involved but one of the main goals is to figure out how drivers interact with the kernel of IRIX, and by working on an older version of the OS we can simply when we start going towards the 6.5 kernel fill in the missing blanks and adapt our writing to it so we won't be starting from scratch.

Besides that if there's any sort of assistance that we can offer to the devs of MAME or other projects we will do our best to provide pertinent information in a timely fashion.

One of the other aspects involved is that if we can find out subsystems that are identical or similar to say Solaris/illumos we might be able to adapt to those subsystems instead of writing code from scratch. I can't make any promises though it's just some of the goals that we have in mind.

Doing the same thing for 6.5 would have been quite financially untenable by comparison. If we can keep the conversation rolling and deliver on a smaller target like this, the main theory is that we would have secured enough community trust and a track record of delivering on our promises so that we can embark on a much larger scope of a project and hopefully secure greater cooperation.

In plain terms, I didn't want this project to end up being some sort of pie in the sky thing with a massive budget up front that we would need people to be forking over massive sums. We get 200 people donating $25 each, that is a much more attainable goal than something along the lines of 1000 people donating $50-60 each. Assuming we get within 75-80% of our goals it might be possible for me to source the rest from other investors. Some people I spoke with were hesitant to be upfront investors unless we had other people who were guaranteed to be part of the operation.

If this project doesn't work out it's not the biggest deal in the world and I do have multiple contingency plans in place that might be able to preserve some of the goals that we are stating here but those plans in particular are actually far more logistically challenging than what I'm asking for here.