[InactiveUser45]

Please note that IRIX 6.5 is EXTREMELY SLOW with MAME, the IRIX 6.2 CHD runs much better

Yeah, I just noticed this myself. The difference in speed is indeed significant.

[InactiveUser45]

I have not successfully mounted multiple CHDs and succeeded in booting. For whatever reason that just has not seemed to work.

I'm not sure what issues you're running into, but when I copy the Irix 6.2 CHD that comes with the MAME 0.224 'software list' to a copy of 'foo.chd', then the following command succeeds in booting, and the 2nd disk seems to show up in the Irix GUI 'Disk Manager' :

copy irix_6_2.chd foo.chd
mame64 indy_4610 -harddisk irix_6_2.chd -scsibus:2 harddisk -harddisk2 foo.chd

Selecting the disk and clicking on 'initialize', and then rebooting, let's me select 'mount' in the tool (onto a new mountpoint, but not extending an existing filesystem. Perhaps this is not possible with Irix 6.2 ?).

Unfortunately, I do not have enough experience with Irix to know how to proceed from there.


PS: (When I use the same copy command and MAME commandline on the Irix 6.2 image that was posted in this forum, MAME boots but the 2nd disk does not show up in 'Disk Manager'. But I cannot tell why that is).

---

PS2: If you obtain the 6.2 CHD that comes with the MAME 0.224 'software list', you may not need to enlarge the filesystem to begin with: it's about 8GB in the emulated Irix instance, with about 12% used. This may be enough for your needs. YMMV.

[Raion]

Just a gentle reminder to the participants here:

Temper your expectations. This is experimental. It's not a replacement for the real system. You're not gonna see a full speed Indy anytime soon with everything. If you don't want a system running like a retarded horse, I recommend biting the bullet and buying a low-end SGI of some kind.

[InactiveUser45]

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but... Is there any documentation (official SGI or otherwise) that describes how to perform (basic) system administration tasks on Irix (6.2) ? I have some experience with administrating Unix/Linux systems (and assUme that a lot of that translates to Irix), but never had any formal exposure to Irix. I guess I am looking for administration documentation that describes commandline tools for basic tasks like adding users, creating filesystems, adding/listing hardware, etc.

Thanks in advance.

[Raion]

MAME related things can stay in MAME, general questions can go in beginner as long as they aren't emulation related.

To answer your question try going to techpubs.jurassic.nl

[InactiveUser45]

MAME related things can stay in MAME, general questions can go in beginner as long as they aren't emulation related.

To answer your question try going to techpubs.jurassic.nl

Hi,

Thanks for the response. I'll move it over to the 'Beginners' space then. And thanks for the link. I guess i'll be looking for "IRIX Admin: ..." series then, to begin with. Thanks again.

[Raion]

You're quite welcome.

[sgi_tx]

I recently tried emulating an Indy on MAME, running on an 8th gen i7. Image was on an SSD and the system has 32GB RAM. The experience I had was similar to most descriptions I’ve read; about 30% of a low end Indy.

Which begs the questions:

1. Even if no further changes are made to software, can we expect a doubling of the performance over the next 2-3 years as CPU performance increases?
2. Will overclocking speed things up for now?
3. Does SGI emulation under MAME make use of many cores?

Has anyone attempted to benchmark performance on various host systems? It would be interesting to learn what the bottleneck is.

[Raion]

Likely not, because process shrinks are done. It's single threaded, and while overclocking your CPU could help a little, it's unlikely to make a massive difference. The main issue is that MAME is built for accuracy first and foremost, not speed. Unless someone volunteers a JIT, sgi-mame will continue to run like a two-legged horse with downs.

[shrek]

MAME itself is multithreaded but as far as I can tell the Indy driver is not. There might be a reason for this but only the devs will know. Hopefully the driver can be updated and scaled out, since single core performance has stagnated for a few years but everyone is adding more cores to compensate for this.

Another possibility might be adding more CPUs to the Indy, if IRIX and the PROM allow it. And then give each of them a host core.