[Raion]

On the IRC we have had a MAME dev working on Iris Indigo and Indy emulation. While a cycle exact replica in software is a long way off (it can't even boot to an installer or preinstalled disk) he has made progress according to him with getting it into a more usable state. 

There has been as of recent a lot of discussion about this on Reddit and in the Discord and I'd like to step up and say my piece, which can be summed up as:

Emulation of Silicon Graphics hardware is unlikely to revitalize our community any more than traditional efforts. As these are not video game computers, and the platforms being currently targeted are very old instances I do not see it as particularly useful now or in the near future as so much of the higher-end systems is undocumented and unlikely to be replicated in the near future. 

This is why I don't have emulation discussion categories. There's no point in sitting around talking about what is essentially vaporware until it brings something usable to the table. I'm not trying to tread on anybody's efforts I just have reservations and doubts. I don't think it'll bring useful people into the community and I think that emulation is not going to offer very much at the end of the day.

We currently operate on a walled garden model of sorts because you have to have relatively high investment in order to be part of the hobby, and this really keeps a lot of the more obnoxious and annoying people from sticking around. Having functional emulation will bring challenges and it won't be like suddenly we have a superior solution either. 

This is why I don't fund development of emulators I'm more interested in seeing our software transcend hardware in a more haiku type model. Don't get me wrong I love my hardware that I have spent a lot of money on, but IRIX as a free open source OS on modern hardware would do far more for the community than any emulation.

feel free to discuss below based on what I say or what you have to say on the matter I could be completely wrong and be proven wrong in the near future about this and I accept that. Regardless of how I personally feel about emulation once we have some sort of reference implementation that works to a functional degree I will probably end up adding emulation categories.