13 May
2013
13 May
'13
8:52 a.m.
A while ago, somebody put an SGI IRIS 2020 out
on the loading dock of the computer science building at
work, where they often put things they think somebody
might want to tinker with. I dragged it over to my building
and plugged it in, and the console monitor came up.
That machine had almost a Unix shell as the console monitor,
you could read files off the disk and such.
Well, I took it home and after consulting with some
people online who know the model, it was determined that
the geometry engine was bad. I found a guy in Germany
who had all the boards and shipped them to me for a
couple hundred Dollars. I plugged the GE board in, and
it booted IRIX. I got the guy who wrote the SGI flight
sim demo to send me the source code, compiled it, and
it worked. (He has asked me not to name him, as that
program is under SGI copyright.) It had a quirk due
to using the GE's matrix
transforms to do ALL 3D arithmetic, including the
"flight dynamics". It would get "stuck" at the 4 main
compass points. I never figured out how to recode
that to use standard C arithmetic. It was a cool toy,
but then 3DFX and similar PC graphics boards came
out and Flight Gear was created. The replacement
GE board eventually also failed, and although I had
plenty of chips to swap to repair it, I didn't have the
diags to find out which one was bad. I eventually sold
all the boards to a broker to use for repairs. Apparently
the Air Force still uses them, I'm guessing maybe for
flight simulators.
Jon