Back when I had my Indigo XS24 up and running as my main workstation, I remember they used to put out periodic "Hot Mix" demo CDs with a bunch of the latest third party software to try out. Loading the demos off the CD was excruciatingly slow, but I definitely looked forward to getting the disks in the mail.
Around 1995 or 1996, a friend said he'd played a speederbike graphics/game demo running on an SGI system at some kind of touring SGI promotional event.
I've never been able to find screenshots or video of it, and was hoping it might be included here. No such luck. I don't suppose anyone remembers it?
So looking forward to trying this! What was the one where a car was driving through a town with a few city blocks? The traffic lights would cycle way too fast…
The bounce demos all show the x29.. I wanted to see the Martini and the WV in particular, I remember those as very impressive at the time (shadowing etc).
Maybe I have to fire up my old SGI Octane..
Spent many (un)happy hours in front of both SGI Indy and SGI O2 during my PhD...
High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
Like raising dinosaurs from their blood found in amber-encapsulated mosquitoes dug up in mines deep underground, archaic software has been resurrected with modern technology because computer scientists were so excited they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should!
Anyone remember a MSDos capture the flag game where you controlled jello blobs like the jello demo [0], went left to right in 3D and controlled with the mouse. Been trying to remember the name of it.
One of my favorite demos. First time seeing physics and interactive 3d combined. SGI had to change the name to 'newton' because 'jello' is a trademark.
Interesting that the canvas looks to be in a 5:3 aspect ratio. Did SGI displays have that shape, or would they have used non-square pixels like many DOS games in CGA/EGA resolution?
The first thing I noticed when seeing the SGI demos for the first time is that the menu UI is strikingly similar to the file select screen in Super Mario 64.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Really cool project, although it's too bad half the links are broken :(
Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.
SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.
I seem to recall the earliest "real-time" Visible Human volume rendering demo being run on either a Cray or IBM (?) supercomputer back in the late 1990s. But, I couldn't remember enough keywords to find a reference and confirm it.
What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.
I had an Onyx back in the day, and I remember one of the demos being a photo of a lion or tiger, and clicking on the photo caused it to warp in three dimensions like a sheet of rubber. Does anyone remember this or am I hallucinating?
37 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 54.6 ms ] threadSad
I've never been able to find screenshots or video of it, and was hoping it might be included here. No such luck. I don't suppose anyone remembers it?
https://youtu.be/OZTnR3FpUEA?t=412
... except that this was on a 7MHz chip.
High point was definitely when we found out that if you telnetted to another box you could remotely play audio clips and the operator typically had no idea what was going on. Every single device ended up with a collection of Star Wars audio clips ... :)
1/10 for usefulness but 10/10 for cool
[0] https://sgi-demos.github.io/sgi-demos/demos/jello/web/jello_...
It made other contemporary CRTs feel like flat screens by comparison.
Of course, Nintendo 64 was developed in partnership with Silicon Graphics, so there's a clear connection, and I'm far from the first to make this observation. Still, I feel as though there must be some untold history where perhaps it was used as a placeholder menu early in development, but the team grew fond of it and eventually used the same effect for the final release.
Here's a decent comparison: https://www.resetera.com/threads/super-mario-64-took-its-3d-...
hard to believe that an SGI demo on modern hardware would require that much
Also too bad they weren't able to recover the best demo, the human cross-section demo. Someone paid a murderer for the rights to his body after he was executed, and then they chopped it up and recorded all the cross-sections.
SGI took that data and used it to create a demo that let you see the human body in a way no one (back in 2000 at least) had seen before. Nowadays, you can probably get something similar on WebMD, but at the time it was crazy impressive.
What I recall was that it was a distributed (clustered) machine type, not a shared memory model like the Origins and not having significant GPU hardware. The central hack was recognizing that the total RAM of the multi-node supercomputer was large enough to hold the large volume data in a chunked, distributed fashion. An MPI job ran a software renderer in parallel on all these chunks, with a 2D gather+compose to produce the final 2D image for viewing.