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IRIX 3dfx Voodoo driver and glide2x IRIX port(sdz-mods.com)
68 points by zdw 11 hours ago | 7 comments
kmavm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was an intern at SGI in the summer of 1998, when we shipped the latest minor version of IRIX, 6.5. I worked on a test suite for IRIX's pthreads implementation, and got to ship a teeny, tiny bit of real code that fixed a real-time hold-off in pthread_mutex_t. (IRIX is a hard RTOS, you see.) As things happened, the dot-dot releases of that minor version would be the last releases of IRIX to roll off the software assembly lines before SGI put it in maintenance mode for these last darn-near-30-years.

In 2000, I was the 20th-or-so full-time engineer at VMware, where I worked for 9 years. Then was at Facebook from 2009 to 2016, where I worked on the search backend (now replaced), HHVM (which still runs the Big Blue Application, a shrinking portion of the Meta Empire), and started FAIR in 2015 (which finally seems to have turned around the "open" sign with Yann's departure).

In 2016 I started at Slack as Chief Architect, where I mostly did not write a ton of code. I worked on a job queue scheduler which I would not be surprised to find has been replaced. And after that I was mostly encouraging/advising people doing Real Work.

All of which is to say, it is quite possible that the last code I've worked on professionally that is out there running on customer machines ... is that libpthread mutex bug fix from when I was barely old enough to drink.

somat 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Now I am curious, how does the voodoo 1 compare with the native o2 gfx?

The o2 used a unified memory scheme so it's graphics were never as fast as it's big brother the octane's impact graphics but because of the unified memory it was a texture power house in comparison, close to a GB of texture memory in 1996 is mind blowing, in comparison the ocatane's impact graphics had 4 mb of texture memory and if you payed out the big bucks for a max impact with double the memory(which was the size of a large motherboard)... you still only got 4mb because the extra memory was basicly sli. and a graphics board that had the reputation of desoldering it's own memory off.

cellularmitosis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Klipsch was famous for making speakers using acoustic horns, which was somewhat esoteric. When they finally made a speaker which used a conventional woofer, they named it “the heresy”.

A 3dfx card running in an O2 surely deserves a similar moniker :)

HerbManic 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very nice. I guess the final boss would be to port Quake 1 with glide to support this.

somat 4 hours ago | parent [-]

A nice joke but... this is an sgi, they pretty much invented accelerated graphics. Original glquake used minigl which was GL cut down and neutered to fit within the glide api, these guys invented and their systems could run the full GL. There actually was a very nice accelerated port of Quake on the demo disks included with the system.

anthk 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's already done as Quake it's libre source and if the GLIDE headers for SGI match the ones of the 3DFX ones from the Linux implementation it would be just a matter of path setting and a few ifdefs.

aa-jv 2 minutes ago | parent [-]

As someone with a room full of SGI equipment which already runs Quake (and Doom, and Mektar and Tranquility), I can only say: this port to Voodoo on Irix needs to be done. ;)