Classic SGI CGI

[massiverobot]

So following along with the cool work done over in: https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/alias-3-patch.77/

And to showcase the recent recovery of some classic SGI animation packages recently found I've posted some screen shots of them running on my SGI PowerSeries 4D/320VGX. This system is running 4D1 3.3.2 (aka IRIX 3).

Here is a hinv to see what is going on:

# hinv
1 33 MHZ IP7 Processor
FPU: MIPS R2010A/R3010 VLSI Floating Point Chip Revision: 3.0
CPU: MIPS R2000A/R3000 Processor Chip Revision: 2.0
Data cache size: 64 Kbytes
Instruction cache size: 64 Kbytes
Main memory size: 128 Mbytes
Integral Ethernet controller: Version 2
VGX Graphics option installed
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93A
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0



The two packages are:

801-0056-001A_Personal_Visualizer - a free Scientific / Engineering 3D app from Wavefront 1998
801-0059-001A_IRIS_Visual_Tools_1.0 - some freebe apps from Alias - Quick Model and Quick Paint also around late 80s.

These were before Alias and Wavefront became Alias/Wavefront.

Installing Visualizer:


installing Visual Tools:


Running QuickModel:


Running Personal Visualizer:


rendering the included Space Shuttle scene:


Using PV is very wierd, but I do have the User Guide which has a ton of info- working on getting that scanned for others.

next up is Alias 3 running on 4D1 3.3.2 with some help from others in this forum.

More to come.

 

[massiverobot]

Finding where the software was installed was a little tricky. I had to use strings on the inst idb file to see wtf inst stuck the binary. It was also not named what the manual said it was named, which was why find wasn't working!

# strings vis.idb
...
f 0755 bin bin usr/sbin/IRIS_Visualizer cmd/wave/Machine/bin/IRIS_Visualizer size("2822208") sum("7172") vis.sw.vis

the very last thing installed was the binary, you can grep on lines that start with 'f' - file to make it easier.

I had to go to the actual inst files, not the logs that inst created- because those logs for the Visualizer at least didn't log any of the file paths - it showed just the sw. names installed, which was useless.

also in 4D1 inst keeps it's logs in /usr/lib/inst...