when Ritsuko times out

I received a E-series TRAM module for my SGI Octane a few days ago. I’ll get some photos of it up in time. mplayer finally plays video smoothly (except when the CPU gets swamped, it’s only 300MHz), Quake 1, 2 with hardware accelerated 3D finally work (Quake 3 too, but I wouldn’t try it on a SE+TRAM).
Performance is abysmal. Both Quake 1 and 2 only play smoothly at 640×480 (OK, so maybe SGI’s doing more accurate texture filtering here), and since IRIX can’t switch the video resolution depending on the app, running Quake 2 “fullscreen” results in the image you see above. Overall… I wish I’d spent my hard earned money on a V6 instead. Oh, and the Really Slick Screensavers now work. I’ll post a video soon.

IBM Intellistation 275
I was searching for Intellistation on eBay when I found this. Just so you know, that’s FUCKING CHEAP even without a hard drive, but I just had to hop on #nekochan on irc.nekochan.net to make sure. It’s real hard to find an intact 9114-275. Hopefully 2×1.45GHz POWER4+ should be enough horsepower to run Firefox – I was quite disappointed with my Octane in that regard, and it never caught on as a desktop workstation. IRIX is a dead end; AIX isn’t.

Speaking of AIX…