[ginza]

New MAME 0.208 out. Unfortunately no SGI updates, it seems, though some improvements to mips1 emulation.

[shrek]

I had a few hours to waste today so I've been playing with emulation on my laptop. It's extremely slow. Boot takes 10 minutes and changing the wallpaper takes another 5 or so. MAME reports 8-12%. Something I have noticed is that on Windows, running PowerShell as an administrator and launching MAME from that will give you a small speed increase. Don't know why but I'll take it. I'm attaching a few pictures below of the progress I've made so far. When logging in, only do it as root. Otherwise it takes forever to load NetScape on the guest account and the setup probably isn't much better. With root you wait for the default apps to open, then close the icon catalog and console. Set the wallpaper to solid. This reduces the lag quite a bit, so that you can actually move windows around. 

Thanks dexter1 for the disk image with IRIX 6.2, and for pointing us towards the correct PROM image. 
In case anyone is wondering, the host has an i5-3320M, 8GB RAM, an SSD, and Windows 10 LTSC. 

[Alex_n505x]

Great, I will give it a try on my mackbook pro.
Is the CPU of the Notebook all the time running on 100% or does it more working like inefficient web page with no CPU load?
Thanks

[hermyIrix]

Hi Guys,

for as much as i love emulators, i have a bit of difficulties to see the potential use-cases... what are you guys planning to run in it?

what i would be ultimately looking for is being able to integrate irix6.2 on sgi hardware in my current linux environment, such as ssh, XForward, NFS etc. this is for me the real reason for not really using this incredible legacy
-- but maybe that's for another forum topic ?

H

[Raion]

Sometimes I doubt emulation will become usable, but I've become friends with one of the MAME devs on this (MogMiner) and he's a pretty decent fellow.

[shrek]

Great, I will give it a try on my mackbook pro.
Is the CPU of the Notebook all the time running on 100% or does it more working like inefficient web page with no CPU load?
Thanks

Not sure what you meant by this. On my machine it uses about half of the processing power while running the VM. The task manager shows four logical cores on the graph. I'm not sure exactly how Windows and MAME are each utilizing the processing power but it shows all four in use.

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for as much as i love emulators, i have a bit of difficulties to see the potential use-cases... what are you guys planning to run in it?

I really just want to use it for text editing and basic shell tasks. I think this will be doable once the emulator reaches about 30% or more of the speed of a real Indy. IRIX is just pleasant to use. The GUI in my opinion is much better than anything you'd find on Linux these days.

[Alex_n505x]

Thank you, yes that was my question...
After dexter1‘s quote #10 I was more expecting that only one core or logical core is up to 100%...

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From my side I would love to take a SGI machine everywhere, doing some practice while i.e. traveling to friends and parants...

[dexter1]

I've been doing some performance measurements with the mame 207 build and the emulated Indy PROM screen. First i've built the mame binary with the (in my opinion) fastest possible make command line options:

Code:

make -j5 SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/indy_indigo2.cpp REGENIE=1 TOOLS=1 OPTIMIZE=3 ARCHOPTS_C=-march=native ARCHOPTS_CXX=-march=native

I think OPTIMIZE is the correct keyword: i incorrectly mentioned OPTIMISE previously.
With the above make command i get about 19% on my Core i5-4590 CPU @ 3.30GHz.

Looking at 'perf top' in the linux-tools-generic package i record these functions and their percentage of cpu time:



So it looks like the R4000 core code in mame is taking about 60% of the total CPU time and if there is room for improvements, that would be the first place to start. I've tried with -drc and -nodrc and it didn't make any difference, so in infer that there is no dynamic recompile code active, which could potentially create lots of speed improvements.

We'll have to see what the future brings.

[ginza]

Interesting! I'm sure there is a lot of room for improvement. Though not a perfect comparison, Killer Instinct, using a R4600 @ 100mhz and SF Rush using a R5000 @ 200mhz run well above 100% on my old I5 4670K @ 3,4ghz.

[computron]

i cannot use it with my Windows version......

any help appreciated !

Cheers

Eve