[CyberMonkey]

https://hackaday.com/2021/05/01/could-se...i-machine/

Anyone have the hardware to be able to find out?

[Raion]

I don't have an origin 2000 rack, but I do have a deskside. I think it can probably run 2-4 Quake players if the Quake system is well-optimized, but more likely that it could run a dozen or more doom players easily.

Either way, the comments on that article are a shitshow.

[kaigan]

I intend to do the four-player version of this with my Onyx2 deskside. I found a couple of inexpensive CADDuo cards on eBay, and they're on the way. With the PCI cage and CADDuo I already have, four players in Quake should be feasible. We'll see how it goes once the parts get here!

[Irinikus]

Quake (even Quake III) only uses one thread so I suppose you should comfortably be able to run as many instances as you have threads available. (Leave at least one thread available for background system tasks, as I’m sure that this would affect how smoothly things run.)

The Tezro only has four CPU's and this video that I made shows it running Doom, Quake I, Quake II, Quake III, Powerflip and the Atlantis demo simultaneously: (Yes there weren't individual keyboard and mouse inputs controlling each of them, so this may have an impact on overall performance!)

[Shiunbird]

Can you map different keyboards and mice to different tty sessions?
And can you have multiple graphical tty sessions?

If you can run multiple times the same binary on the same session but can map different input devices to each one of them, it would work too, I guess.

[SGIArtist]

What would really be cool is if it was possible to send video output of those 7 sessions over a network and receive input over a network so we could have a LAN party across the world .

[defaultrouteuk]

No need to run so many instances if it's a gaming experience you are looking for. If the IP stack on the Quake binary is working then I'm being entirely serious when I say I think IRIXNET can make a LAN party across the world happen for real. We simply need a bridged VPN and everyone needs to configure the VPN on their home router. Since we would be using L2TPv3 all you need to do is check your router supports it.

Your SGI would then need to be part of that shared network. You can simply add a secondary interface (logical) and IP address - no need to start fracking around with your home network.

We've been here before but no-one really kicked me in the balls hard enough to make it happen. The platform is already online, I just need to add usernames and then some people to test it, without expectation of it working first time! Testing will be essential.

[stormy]

I think a lot of people are misunderstanding what they mean. To be clear they're talking about visualizing 7 unique client-side experiences, each with their own display, keyboard and mouse, all computed by the SGI. Some people think they mean just running a dedicated server that other people can connect to.

[Irinikus]

An Onyx2 Infinite Reality 4 desk-side system fitted with a DG5-8 could theoretically run up to 8 instances, each on their own screen, you'd just have to fit the appropriate number of CAD-Duo cards.

Each of the four CPU's can handle 2 threads, but I don't know what impact the CAD-Duo cards, with their individual sets of keyboards and mice will have on the overall system performance though!

[kaigan]

An Onyx2 Infinite Reality 4 desk-side system fitted with a DG5-8 could theoretically run up to 8 instances, each on their own screen, you'd just have to fit the appropriate number of CAD-Duo cards.

Each of the four CPU's can handle 2 threads, but I don't know what impact the CAD-Duo cards, with their individual sets of keyboards and mice will have on the overall system performance though!

I didn't realize the Onyx2 CPUs could handle two threads each. That's really nifty. Once my CADDuo cards arrive, we'll see how the four-user idea pans out. If it goes well, maybe I can expand the setup out in the future. I'm also not sure how IR3 would handle things vs. IR4, but that will also be a limitation of my current setup.