[shrek]

These are my current command line options: ./mame indy_4610 -gio64_gfx xl24 -hard1 irix65.chd -window -sound none -cheat -nothrottle

Once the emulation starts I press Scroll Lock for partial keyboard, P to pause and then `~ to get into the cheat options menu. Then press the arrow up and down keys to navigate. Then you can over or under clock stuff.


ioc2:kbd:ms_naturl:ms_natrl_cpu 200%
ioc2:kbdc:mcu 200%
maincpu 33%

This seems to make mouse and keyboard input a lot less sluggish and programs open a little quicker. In the PROM and IRIX it's still reporting a 66MHz clock so I don't know how far it can actually underclock the main CPU.

A friend suggested putting all of the MAME binaries and the IRIX CHD on a RAM disk to see what would happen. This looks like it helps make the emulated Indy a lot more responsive but doesn't really speed up the emulation of the CPU.

Make a RAM disk in Linux (needs root): mount -t tmpfs -o -size=8G tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk

Remember to copy your files back out of the RAM disk when you're done or they will get lost when you shut the computer off or unmount it! 

[ginza]

Interesting notes!

I'm not sure why you overclock the keyboard cpu - this could possibly make things slower, I guess?

Underclocking CPU should work - I get a correct clock in IRIX though, e.g. 33 mhz or 35 mhz in this case.

The "-sound none" commandline, should actually not have any effect, I think it would be necessary to modify the source code to exclude emulation of the sound hardware. See here: https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/sh...=5&o=&vc=1

"Back in the day, running with -nosound caused MAME to specifically exclude certain driver hardware when running the game. More recently, the decision was made for MAME to always emulate the sound hardware - mostly to reduce bug reports from people running with -nosound.

So, nowadays, there shouldn't be much (if any) difference between running with -sound none and running with normal MAME. In the past, though, it might have gained you some frames per second, at the cost of potentially fucking up the emulation of the game itself."

If you just want to run the Indy/Indigo2 headless, you can increase the speed further by using the commandline options -gio64_gfx "" -ioc2:rs232b terminal (with the blank quotes to remove the gfx card) to get a virtual terminal only. This increases emulated speed from about 40 mhz to 50 mhz on my 5800X at 4,7 Ghz.

You can also get higher speed than default with gfx card emulation by running 1024x768 resolution, and possibly by turning down the refresh-rate, though I have only been able to use the lower resolution in the prom so far, it glitches when booting IRIX.

[shrek]

Overclocking they keyboard controller makes text input feel more responsive to me. When I type in IRIX it drops fewer keystrokes, I think. I have no actual benchmarks to prove it though. Removing the sound is just my personal preference and I don't know how much it helps performance, if at all. But it might and it's unusable for me anyhow so I added the option.

[Artistic-Irix]

So cool to find this forum and see that I'm not alone!

I've just ran IRIX 6.5.22 under MAME 0.264 today for the first time on an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop and managed to make it run REALLY fast, in fact, MAME says 70%. It boots in a relatively short amount of time, launches simple apps like the terminal pretty quickly and gives an almost lag-free feel to using this terminal and running simple commands in it like top, or an editor like vim, etc. A pleasure to use!

I used the following as a base, and managed to get it up and running in less than a few minutes:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1...CmwuowfYDG

At first it ran pretty slowly and was very laggy, which I thought was to be expected, but then after I gave it more RAM I managed to make it run at ~70%.

The trick was to make sure MAME gives it more RAM, more specifically, 128MB instead of the default 16MB. You do this by pressing the Insert key on your keyboard, then the tab key to pop up the MAME menu, and under "Machine Configuration", in RAM Bank A you set it to use "4x32M". I did have stability problems when trying more RAM via bank B, so just stick with 128MB via Bank A for now.

All in all I'm super impressed, and very happy with the result. Since the current MAME driver for an emulated Indy does not use more than one CPU core on the host, the speed from or over the original hardware you will reach highly depends on the single core performance your machine will have. That said, I'm fairly certain that something like a late generation Apple M3, or the M4 that's about to be released shortly could run it at 100% speed, or faster.

Unfortunately I only managed to get networking to partially function so far.