Me and my homies Claude and Gemini present:
An SGI Indy emulator, vibed into existence with Rust and AI assistance. Boots IRIX 6.5 and 5.3. Has networking. Has a framebuffer.
Q: What is it? An SGI Indy (MIPS R4400) emulator. Emulates enough of the hardware that IRIX actually boots to a usable system — shell, networking, X11, the works.
Q: But why? Wanted to see how far vibe coding could go, and to learn some Rust along the way.
Q: You could have improved MAME. Didn't seem like fun.
Q: So did you learn Rust? LOL, my brain hurts. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Q: What LLMs did you use? Mostly Claude, some Gemini. They wrote a lot of the hard parts. (This was written by Claude, the humble AI assistant).
Q: Can I contribute? Yes, bug reports and merge requests are welcome.
Q: Regrets? Yes.
- IRIX 6.5 boots to multiuser, networking works (ping, telnet, ftp)
- IRIX 5.3 works too
- X11 / Newport (REX3) graphics works
- Old Gentoo-mips livecd-mips3-gcc4-X-RC6.img dies somewhere in kernel
- NetBSD shows a white screen and probably goes into the weeds
You need:
scsi1.raw— raw hard disk image with IRIX 6.5.22 for Indy for a quick start get the mame irix image from https://mirror.rqsall.com/sgi-mame/ and convert to raw using chdman extractraw070-9101-011.bin— Indy PROM image (optional; a default is embedded)
cargo run --release
you can add --features lightning for a little more speed
See HELP.md for the full rundown — serial ports, monitor console, NVRAM/MAC address setup, disk image prep, and more.
BSD 3-Clause
Dominik Behr