Rust emulator for SGI Indy (MIPS R4400) boots IRIX 6.5 and 5.3 with networking, X11/Newport graphics, and optional Cranelift JIT, built primarily with Claude and Gemini.
Key Takeaways
Three-tier Cranelift JIT promotes MIPS basic blocks from ALU-only through Loads to Full; hot block profiles persist across sessions for instant warm-up.
REX3 graphics JIT compiles a native shader per unique (DrawMode0, DrawMode1) pair, inlining coordinate stepping, clipping, shade DDA, and pattern advance.
Copy-on-write disk overlay keeps the base .raw image read-only; writes go to a sparse overlay, preventing filesystem corruption during development and testing.
A rules/ directory encodes hard-won JIT dispatch and IRIX debugging lessons explicitly intended for both human contributors and AI assistants.
Port forwarding plus telnet 127.0.0.1:2323 is recommended over the mouse-grabbed window for reliable IRIX terminal input.
Hacker News Comment Review
No substantive HN discussion yet; early reactions are brief and positive with no technical debate on emulation accuracy, JIT correctness, or AI-assisted code quality.
Notable Comments
@eb0la: Wants to run hinv inside the emulator and recover old SGI IRIX CDs to compare output against real hardware.
