[Raion]

I know this is on another level from say, the demos on the C64 or Amiga. There's far more abstraction to worry about, and IMHO, if it bypasses the OS, it kinda doesn't count, but that's just me. 

But I'd like to one day see someone do some actual visual demos. Yes, I know that rendering scenes is something hobbyists do here and stuff, that's not exactly what I mean. 

I mean more along the lines of say, the Ka-boing demo by Kay-Bee, just actually pushing system limits though. I suppose we'll need to help document the OpenGL capabilities of IRIX firstly, though.

Anyone have any ideas that if we found some community members to do this, what you'd like to see?

For me, it'd be kinda cool to see IRIX running Bad Apple as a 3D demo for it, in the vain of the classic demos you used to get with IRIX.

[vishnu]

It's been a while, a long while actually, but some of the xscreensaver hacks don't run to badly on a fast Octane or Fuel or Tezro. Of the hacks from the Really Slick Savers collection, I only seem to remember getting skyrockets running, but it was dreadfully slow...

[flexion]

There are a few demos from like 20 years ago that have been ported to IRIX, most of them make use of SDL1.2.

I would appreciate having more OpenGL documentation, although the supported version is really old.

I could also imagine converting some of my own old demos to OpenGL on IRIX just for fun, but it takes a lot of time and will probably never come to an end due to lack of time :-/

Demos do not always have to be just cutting edge and pushing the limits.. creativity counts! since there are various categories of demos, from 128 bytes on doorstopper retro machines and 4k up to unlimited "all you can eat" mega demos. As long as there is eye candy and it plays on IRIX, it's ok

[shrek]

Maybe I'm at risk of beating a dead horse here but I think there needs to be a decent emulation solution before this can happen. SGI hardware is either prohibitively expensive or difficult to find, or both. People still occasionally make classic MacOS and Amiga software or do ports because the emulation is more or less complete and really fast so it's very accessible to newbies. Progress on the Indy/Indigo2 emulation in MAME seems to have ground to a halt and performance is still around 30% of the real machines no matter what kind of hardware people throw at it.

I'm not a very good programmer but I can always offer to chip in a few bucks here and there if someone wanted to fork it or make a new emulator. 

[Raion]

I can't fund emulation stuff, nor do I think that's a good use of money with our software situation like it is.

[shrek]

I can't fund emulation stuff, nor do I think that's a good use of money with our software situation like it is.

I'm not really up to speed on that. What are the major roadblocks preventing something like a development bounty program for various projects?

[Raion]

We do have a bounty sub forum, but we have a serious lack of people who are interested in donating money. The other issue that I'm concerned with is organization based. As it stands right now I can do anything webdev related or programming related myself or outsource it to people who can do it better than I can. 

But if people start donating to me expecting me to fund emulation projects there are three major concerns that I have:

1. Transparency. This is a double-edged sword as it could easily get me in hot water with the IRS if I don't pay taxes on what's legally considered income. On the other hand I don't want to be completely opaque about funding goals because that would be incredibly dishonest and open it up to questions of abuse or misappropriation. 

2. Forming a team. As it stands a lot of the younger developers that are coming to the community I don't know particularly well and I worry that if I give them money on behalf of the community that some of them might be grifters or unable to complete the work and end up spending the money as theirs. Generally speaking when people donate to the site for development work or otherwise I try to make sure that it gets spent exactly where they asked and that none of it gets wasted. 

3. I question whether we are the right person to handle this when it might be better to just donate directly to such a person promising to make such a thing. Due to patents and stuff I'm not exactly sure how much of the hardware we can legally emulate without stepping on somebody's toes and patent law is not something that I'm willing to take a chance with. I don't want to open up the site to wider legal liability. You might sit there and say that this is not a serious concern because of X Y or Z but I have started to see game and computer companies cracking down on emulators and I'm frankly a little bit hesitant to step my toe in the water. 

Moreover we don't have a whole lot of cross-compatibility right now. XFS on IRIX doesn't work under modern kernels for Linux, we don't have FAT32 or anything remotely cross-compatible other than fat 16 which has serious system limitations, and even emulation itself can't even seem to get the networking right much less acceptable performance from the pre-existing projects. So it's not going to make it very easy for people to get things on and off the systems. I would much rather focus development efforts on improving that environment first and making sure that we have a good amount of open source software to run (including SDL2 and other common libraries.) So that it's going to be an attractive platform for the demo scene. 

I've kind of mentioned this before but I don't really consider it a demo unless it actually shows off the system capabilities acceptably. Playing bad apple in Mplayer is one thing, playing back a recreation of bad apple in poweranimator at full speed and high resolution is another.

[shrek]

I understand and agree with you on 1 and 3. But for point 2 you could always just make a rule of only paying out after the work is completed. If you're worried about code quality maybe have a few other users take a look at it. Just a suggestion for this kind of thing in general, not just emulators. Maybe you already thought of that, I don't know.

[Raion]

It's hard to motivate people to work unless you at least cut them an advance.