[rescue] IRIX 6.5.20f disks

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 10:12:41AM -0500, Francois Dion wrote:
> So I guess Irix Photoshop is out. You can run Bochs on irix, with 
> Windows / photoshop within it, but that is way too slow and unstable. 
> Maybe wine? Has wine ever been ported to Irix, assuming it doesn't rely 
> on x86 specific instructions, but then how would you get the x86 
> binaries to run? So that is ruled out also.

Wine Is Not an Emulator. :)

Maybe there would be a way to combine bochs and wine.  It would be
faster than pure emulation, but still slow.
 
> Beside the Gimp and FilmGimp/CinePaint, what other options are there for 
> image editing? Any other commercial app for Irix that can be picked up 
> for a not indecent amount of money? Something that is more Photoshop 
> like in look and feel? This is for my wife, to run on an Octane. She 
> doesn't like Gimp.

There is Amazon paint and Matador paint.  Amazon paint is still a
current product.  Matador paint got canceled, however it is easy to
find.

Finally, not quite the same thing, but there is Pagemento (more page
layout though).
 
> Same thing for Blender. She doesn't like it too much. She likes Martin 
> Hash but that is not available for Irix, and she likes Maya, but it is 
> no longer available for Irix and it is too expensive. I was hoping to 
> find an older sealed box Maya, that is why I was asking about surplus 
> software store that still carry Irix software.

What do you mean Maya is no longer available for Irix?  David Walker
just announced that they had no plans to cancel the Irix port, and
further Maya 5.0 was just released.  That doesn't help the cost though,
unless you can swing an educational discount.

There are some other packages out there.  A company called Realsoft has
a package that is more affordable package.  There were some crappy ones
(3dgig or something comes to mind), but I think Realsoft is considered
respectable. 

Wish I could say something better.  
 
Blender is getting better, I think.  I still can't quite seem to come to
terms with it though.  People kvetch about Softimage3D being hard, but
from where I sit, it is easier compared to Blender.  For some reason I
try to follow the tutorial, anmd I still can't get bones to work
properly. 

> I wont even go into the Fractal Design, Corel and all that other 
> software... What are you using on your SGI? Where can I get the software?

I fiddle with Blender.  As I mentioned before, I'm having all sorts of
trouble with bones.

I also run BMRT (also discontinued) and Angel.

I use the Gimp (I certainly wouldn't say it is as good as Photoshop for
all tasks, but I feel it is a fine program, especially when compared to
versions 4 and 5 of photoshop, which is what I've used the most).

I use imagemagick some (never underestimate the usefullness of a good
command line utility, especially for scriptability), and the SGI tools
some. 

I'm working on getting wings on Irix.  It builds fine, but there is a
nasty bug that makes it nearly unusable.  But, that does bring up one
point.  Generally, if a program will run on Linux, it will run with the
display piped to Irix just fine.  Even graphics heavy stuff like the
gimp and wings run pretty well with FastE between the two machines.  For
reasons that had as much to do with politics as anything, I used to run
the gimp on an Onyx with the display piped to an O2 to do some
relatively heavy work.

Anyway, I also right some of my own stuff.  Compositing is trivial to
program, and the Octane does it with 12bits of precision, so you don't
really need to have a software renderer for quality.  Generating mattes
and effects is the hard part to program somewhat, and it isn't really
that hard to do one off programs for various things.  The tricky part is
tieing lots of stuff together into one program.  One of my side projects
is getting some of the GUI tools together to do that.  My idea is a
scheme like (or more likely actual scheme) scripting language for
compositing, and a gui uses a process diagram (think shake, Nuke, and to
a lesser extent Flint, Flame, Inferno, and Combustion).  
 
> She will keep her Windows 2000 workstation, but that is going to be a 
> challenge to set up a kvm for a Peecee and Octane with an SGI monitor 
> (not going to put 2 20" monitors on her desk).

Err, if you us a PC monitor that supports sync on green, then virtually
any KVM will work if you use a cheap 13w3->vga adapter to feed the
octane into the KVM.  At least in theory it should work.  I just have
two monitors on my desk.  One for the Octane, and one hooked to a KVM
for everything else.