As per the title I'll looking to buy an Onyx4 UltimateVision, and I'm open to anything from a 2-brick system to something a little bigger, whatever I can get really. I'm in Basel, Switzerland but willing to ship or freight from anywhere.
That's a big, rare system for a first-time poster, so a little background. My life with SGI hardware started in the 90s as a software dev at a video facilities house, then one day I got to take home an old Personal Iris (4D/25 IIRC), which over the next few years was traded up via various machines to a dual-head Indigo2 with granite monitors. Then, after moving house far too many times in quick succession and carrying this stuff around I went to an O2 and 1600SW. The O2 was upgraded to an R12k, and even supplanted for a brief dalliance with a VW320. Several countries later and the only thing that remains is a still-boxed 1600SW (and MLA).
Why do I want such a beast? I'm a 3D dev, worked on everything from tools to games, and currently planning what to do post-work in a couple of years. For fun at work a few years back I ported our commercial 3D engine to an old Mac G5 to prove a silly point, and once everything was running on big endian and GL2, I thought, hmm, I could get this running on SGI kit. Anyway, the seed was sown and whilst I don't want to do exactly that, I do want to add an UltimateVision to the list of esoteric hardware I'm working on for engine projects that'll eventually be open sourced.
It'll join old systems like the G5, and modern oddities such as the Talos II. Plus we've all got to do something when we too become obsolete!
It won't sit gathering dust, it'll get loved, upgraded, maintained and used.
That's a big, rare system for a first-time poster, so a little background. My life with SGI hardware started in the 90s as a software dev at a video facilities house, then one day I got to take home an old Personal Iris (4D/25 IIRC), which over the next few years was traded up via various machines to a dual-head Indigo2 with granite monitors. Then, after moving house far too many times in quick succession and carrying this stuff around I went to an O2 and 1600SW. The O2 was upgraded to an R12k, and even supplanted for a brief dalliance with a VW320. Several countries later and the only thing that remains is a still-boxed 1600SW (and MLA).
Why do I want such a beast? I'm a 3D dev, worked on everything from tools to games, and currently planning what to do post-work in a couple of years. For fun at work a few years back I ported our commercial 3D engine to an old Mac G5 to prove a silly point, and once everything was running on big endian and GL2, I thought, hmm, I could get this running on SGI kit. Anyway, the seed was sown and whilst I don't want to do exactly that, I do want to add an UltimateVision to the list of esoteric hardware I'm working on for engine projects that'll eventually be open sourced.
It'll join old systems like the G5, and modern oddities such as the Talos II. Plus we've all got to do something when we too become obsolete!
It won't sit gathering dust, it'll get loved, upgraded, maintained and used.