At Saturday I had an opportunity to play with my SGI Indigo which is
hidden in our village house. I did some useful stuff here but it is
probably not so interesting.
I also tried to play some MP3 files here. This Indigo is a 64-bit
computer with the MIPS R4000 CPU (the very firs 64-bit MIPS which runs
at 100MHz). It's a computer from 1992 (or even 1991?) so no one should
expect that such think will work (try to play a MP3 on a 386 or 486 on
from these years!). Anyway, on my (even older) Indigo with the 32-bit
R3000 CPU (33 MHz) it is possible to play MP3 files with the "mpg123"
(the version I have is a venerable IRIX port). But it is not that easy
- any GUI operation has influence on playback.
On the R4000 Indigo there are no such isses. It is easily possible to
work and have the mpg123 running in the background. There are
limitations: the only "mpg123" available is an old version from
1999 which cannot play web stream (no problem for a non-networked
workstation, though) and which segfaults on any non-ASCII character
inside the MP3 file header. The later issue is more important as many
official MP3 files include "correct" names of bands and songs and these
often include non-ASCII characters (Japan symbols, Central European
letters and so on). Of course it is technically possible to modify MP3
headers but I don't want to modify files I bought as it (probably)
might violate someone rights. SO I cannot listen some songs on the
Indigo.
So I am able to work on this computer (by work I mean Vim editing,
compiling and viewing of PDF files) and listening the music. Even
playing the files directly from the SD card (with the SCSI2SD adapter
connected to the external SCSI connector of the Indigo) makes no
problems.
