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Who are the silicon graphics enthusiast members here?

Reviving this thread, I'm into Silicon Graphics here!

A bit about my passion for SGI:
I have a "few" Octanes and an Origin 2200 deskside server.
I have worked with SGIs in the late nineties (and then later crossed my path during work life but wasn't actively using them anymore).
I used to be an active user of MAX/FTS (SGI and the NeXT cube!) and PureData back then and have a little while ago re-discovered the passion to get a working electronic music setup with the Octane as frontend and the Origin 2200 as compute engine.
The MIPS CPU is actually a decent DSP in many ways, it does two floating point operations in one clock cycle, a good floating point pipeline, generous cache, fast system bus (relative to the era), and a low latency ADAT interface as well as MIDI.
Along these lines, I worked with a PD developer to get the latest vanilla version run on Irix again (instead of having to use an ancient version).
A few PD externals have also been compiled for Irix now, including AAO (AudioOverOSC) which was made possible by a fairly recent compile of GCC15.2 that allows us to use C++17 on Irix.
It's a work in progress, the journey counts :)
 
MipsSGI said:
Reviving this thread, I'm into Silicon Graphics here!

A bit about my passion for SGI:
I have a "few" Octanes and an Origin 2200 deskside server.
I have worked with SGIs in the late nineties (and then later crossed my path during work life but wasn't actively using them anymore).
I used to be an active user of MAX/FTS (SGI and the NeXT cube!) and PureData back then and have a little while ago re-discovered the passion to get a working electronic music setup with the Octane as frontend and the Origin 2200 as compute engine.
The MIPS CPU is actually a decent DSP in many ways, it does two floating point operations in one clock cycle, a good floating point pipeline, generous cache, fast system bus (relative to the era), and a low latency ADAT interface as well as MIDI.
Along these lines, I worked with a PD developer to get the latest vanilla version run on Irix again (instead of having to use an ancient version).
A few PD externals have also been compiled for Irix now, including AAO (AudioOverOSC) which was made possible by a fairly recent compile of GCC15.2 that allows us to use C++17 on Irix.
It's a work in progress, the journey counts :)
Click to expand...
Love it is music development fun on sgi ? I still use my o2 for various projects it’s still my favorite machine despite its cooling short comings

Although a 20mm fan on the heart really speeds the machine up alot

Mostly i like small c projects c++ ive never been huge on im interested in midi though whats the best software to use
 
I had a great job writing Softimage plug-ins in the early 90s, with the original Indigo. I loved that machine. About ten years later I picked-up a surplus Indigo2 from work, complete with monitor, IRIX CDs, etc. Unfortunately I had to leave it all with a friend when I returned to Australia from the UK -- not enough room in the shipping container! I'd love to get back in to playing with IRIX.
 
dasch said:
I had a great job writing Softimage plug-ins in the early 90s, with the original Indigo. I loved that machine. About ten years later I picked-up a surplus Indigo2 from work, complete with monitor, IRIX CDs, etc. Unfortunately I had to leave it all with a friend when I returned to Australia from the UK -- not enough room in the shipping container! I'd love to get back in to playing with IRIX.
Click to expand...
It’s definitely fun booting is slow but it’s pretty snappy in os
 
I assume many people who use SGI workstation with Audio actually use SoftWindows programs (I had CakeWalk working there). The SGI Octane has full MIDI integration via dmedia libraries, just no Midi ports, which means one needs the basic drivers, opto-couplers, and connectors (there were a few MIDI interfaces like this offered on eBay while ago). These are "dumb" MIDI interfaces, since the Octane handles the protocol. However, I have not found much SW for it so far.
My favorite sandbox uses PureData, current version runs well on Irix 6.5. There's an ecosystem of externals and plugins, which not all can be compiled, but I have quite a few, some vintage synth emulation ports in the works soon. There's Rosegarden, a nice sequencer with UI but it crashes or freezes frequently (have not looked into that closely), there's ttrk, a text UI MIDI sequencer, which with adding the dmedia MIDI interface code works ok (but not very feature rich), looking into a more modern loop sequencer. I have AAO (AudioOverOsc) which help to interface with modern Audio processing infrastructure. Various Midi controller HW to make it work without having to use a computer interface mostly.
The unfortunate thing is how code got lost or forgotten for this platform.
I guess the "fun" part is not so much the audio development experience on the SGI, but adapting SW to it. I think that's really a good fit. Looking at all the ESP32, Teensy, DaisySeed and RPi audio stuff out there, any R10k+ series system should work well, if one overcomes platform and architecture differences and challenges.
 
MipsSGI said:
I assume many people who use SGI workstation with Audio actually use SoftWindows programs (I had CakeWalk working there). The SGI Octane has full MIDI integration via dmedia libraries, just no Midi ports, which means one needs the basic drivers, opto-couplers, and connectors (there were a few MIDI interfaces like this offered on eBay while ago). These are "dumb" MIDI interfaces, since the Octane handles the protocol. However, I have not found much SW for it so far.
My favorite sandbox uses PureData, current version runs well on Irix 6.5. There's an ecosystem of externals and plugins, which not all can be compiled, but I have quite a few, some vintage synth emulation ports in the works soon. There's Rosegarden, a nice sequencer with UI but it crashes or freezes frequently (have not looked into that closely), there's ttrk, a text UI MIDI sequencer, which with adding the dmedia MIDI interface code works ok (but not very feature rich), looking into a more modern loop sequencer. I have AAO (AudioOverOsc) which help to interface with modern Audio processing infrastructure. Various Midi controller HW to make it work without having to use a computer interface mostly.
The unfortunate thing is how code got lost or forgotten for this platform.
I guess the "fun" part is not so much the audio development experience on the SGI, but adapting SW to it. I think that's really a good fit. Looking at all the ESP32, Teensy, DaisySeed and RPi audio stuff out there, any R10k+ series system should work well, if one overcomes platform and architecture differences and challenges.
Click to expand...
What are you doing with teensy giving the orange a midi port?
 

TeensyMix Synth - DIY 8 Voice Synthesizer

Hi guys, I finally managed to finish and release my DIY synthesizer project, hope it is of use or inspiration to anyone! TeensyMix synth is an 8-voice polyphonic synthesizer based on the Teensy 4.1 development board. It is designed to be an easy build with just an LCD display and a digital to...
forum.pjrc.com

Just saying if an ARM Cortex M7 at 400-600MHz can do funky audio processing, a Dual MIPS R14000 @ 600 MHz or an 8 CPU R14000 at 500MHz certainly can do too. The challenge is dealing with the OS overhead in the proper SGI environment.
 
MipsSGI said:

TeensyMix Synth - DIY 8 Voice Synthesizer

Hi guys, I finally managed to finish and release my DIY synthesizer project, hope it is of use or inspiration to anyone! TeensyMix synth is an 8-voice polyphonic synthesizer based on the Teensy 4.1 development board. It is designed to be an easy build with just an LCD display and a digital to...
forum.pjrc.com

Just saying if an ARM Cortex M7 at 400-600MHz can do funky audio processing, a Dual MIPS R14000 @ 600 MHz or an 8 CPU R14000 at 500MHz certainly can do too. The challenge is dealing with the OS overhead in the proper SGI environment.
Click to expand...
I mean crappy old 8 bit chips can do it of course any sgi could
 
Hi

Was an early nekochan member, i had ported some linux stuff for irix and surely own the biggest french sgi collection...

Still have some like o2000, crimson vgxt, onyx ir, octane 2, pi , Indy, indigo etc....

Still use them when possible....
 
*lol* very true, just that back then they did a lot of ""optimization"" (nowadays looks more like cheating) and custom circuits to squeeze every last bit out of their systems and cleaned it up with a hefty dose of analog magic.

The SGI MIPS RISC architecture lends itself really well to native DSP processing; just OS oversight, context switching, "generous" programming, and now poorly optimized compilers for this architecture (GCC is about the only choice for backporting modern code unless it's rewritten) draw a large computational overhead.

Mentioned bare-metal DSP code implementations on modern flavors of ARM RISC CPUs skip that overhead and provide the tool-chain to do that easily, making them look powerful in comparison.

Unfortunately a lot of the original optimized toolchains for SGI/Irix have disappeared (or are at least not readily available); some of the things I like to do is look into its realtime capabilities (e.g. SGI REACT, or dedicating whole CPU nodes on my deskside Origin2200 server to DSP tasks).
 
dimebag said:
Hi

Was an early nekochan member, i had ported some linux stuff for irix and surely own the biggest french sgi collection...

Still have some like o2000, crimson vgxt, onyx ir, octane 2, pi , Indy, indigo etc....

Still use them when possible....
Click to expand...
Cool! Nice collection! The PI: Professional or Personal Iris? I'm thinking about finding a Professional Iris (ideally with the Octane2 listed here in the marketplace as trade-in part of the transaction).
 
Personnal iris, a 4d25tg, i still have some boards for this, mono, zbuffer. 24bits option, re2, maybe a turbo ....
Must check

I also have a power series, a 4d340gtx

Cheers

Laurent
 
dimebag said:
Personnal iris, a 4d25tg, i still have some boards for this, mono, zbuffer. 24bits option, re2, maybe a turbo ....
Must check

I also have a power series, a 4d340gtx

Cheers

Laurent
Click to expand...
Power series, also nice. I really like the Twin Tower with multi-CPUs and VME slots.
 
I recently got a Personal Iris and it is a lot of fun. 4D/35 with 64mb and 24bit running 4.0.5. I replaced the CPU fan, re-cabled SCSI to not need a real sled and 3d printed my own sled for a Zulu, and recapped the PSU. I'm currently trying to get a VME FDDI board working but can't get it to join the ring.
 
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