Nicolas Calimet <pov### [at] freefr> wrote:
> > I'd like to build on a few ancient machines for demo purposes at a museum
>
>  I'm curious: what kind of machines?

Main one I'm fiddling with at the moment is a Tektronix XD88 workstation
(Motorola 88k CPU). There's an NCR Tower 32 too (68030 CPU), and quite a
few Apollo workstations (think they're all 68k rather than 88k ones). Oh,
and an HP T500 6-CPU machine (that one might stand a chance of running a
decent C++ compiler).

Then we've got a whole pile of various SGI and Sun machines, and a Be-box
too.

I figured I'd see if I could get them doing some co-operative raytracing
with POV - still going to be slow as hell of course but it might make for
an interesting demo.

I've got an SGI Indy with a 24bit frambuffer that could act as the actual
display as a scene was rendered, with the actual processing machines just
running in console mode. Or something. :-) I'm still working out details,
but it all depends whether I can even get POV built and running on a single
machine anyway!

Memory's perhaps the main problem as it depends how efficient POV is when
asked to only render a tiny portion of a scene; I'm not sure what overheads
exist. Most of these ancient servers and workstations aren't capable of
supporting much memory (by modern standards) and of course use custom
memory which is totally unobtainable these days.

> > About the most recent version of GCC that I can compile is probably around
> > 2.7, which I suspect is way too old :-(
>
>  Most likely...  The oldest gcc version that I tried and that is known
> to compile the latest POV-Ray 3.6 is gcc-2.95.

Well, I'll try 3.1 in a bit with a straight C compiler and see how that
goes. Putting m88k back into a new version of GCC might be an option too...

Yep, I be nuts. :)

cheers

Jules

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