I wrote to SGI in high school asking for some info on their computers and they sent back a stack of beautifully printed, full-color brochures. The Indy had a webcam, which was very rare in those days. Also included was a brochure on the Indigo workstation, which Industrial Light and Magic used for Jurassic Park, etc.
Nintendo is a little mysterious when it comes to what their actual tooling was, but I remember Donkey Kong Country being the first time I read they were using SGIs (or at least the studio "Rare" was).
It's somewhat surprising they used the Indy for developing Mario 64 – I always got the sense that it was somewhat lightweight in performance compared to the Indigo, but a very cool machine either way.
I have an SGI rotting in my garage, what's amazing about them is the quality of the monitor. For CRT displays, the best damn monitor I ever experienced, just CRISP.
The Nintendo 64 had a MIPS R4300 chip, the SGI Indigio also used the MIPS Rchip, the early one had R4000/R4400 chip, the later ones R8000+ chips. I can only speculate that by using SGI, you could run some of your non specific N64 code locally and debug faster.
Original PSX had a R3000 chip, but Sony opted for BSD, their devkit ran on FreeBSD PCs and you built the code and ran on actual PSX device. Cheaper...
The Playstation 1 "TOOL" actually ran windows [1]. A large success of the the PS1 however was the the "twin ISA" card dev kit, which could be plugged into any PC-Compatible for PS1 development, which drastically lowered the cost of development for the PS1.
Also BSD != FreeBSD, BSD 4.3 Net/1 (the first BSD released under the BSD license instead of containing AT&T code) was released in 1989.
Was FreeBSD really a requirement? I used to have a Sony Net Yaroze that allowed me to build PSX executables on my PC, using Sony's custom GCC-based toolchain. It didn't require FreeBSD.
Those brochures are probably worth real money on eBay if you still have them, a PowerSeries brochure just sold for $200!
By the time the Indy came out, the Indigo2 had replaced the Indigo, and I suspect a midrange Indy was a good match for a midrange Indigo1 (at much lower cost).
Nintendo made an N64 dev board for the Indy, essentially an N64 on a GIO board, complete with an adapter card to connect controllers.
The joke always was that the Indy was the Indigo without the go :-)
But it was a decent enough machine to develop on, you didn’t need the 3D stuff if you spent all day in Emacs or compiling. Whereas an Indigo was really targeted at say CAD users.
Haha that was because the base Indy was shipping with 16MB of RAM and IRIX 5 was too bloated for that to be usable. Meanwhile everyone with Indigos kept running IRIX 4 until things got better around 5.3.
The Indy had XZ graphics available, which I believe were the same as the top Elan option available on the Indigo (4 GEs)
"We get the inside story on the legendary Rare with an all-star panel - David Doak (GoldenEye), Chris Marlow & Shawn Pile (Conkers Bad Fur Day, David Wise (Donkey Kong Country series) and Kevin Bayliss (Battle Toads/Killer Instinct)"
Nintendo is a little mysterious when it comes to what their actual tooling was, but I remember Donkey Kong Country being the first time I read they were using SGIs (or at least the studio "Rare" was).
It's somewhat surprising they used the Indy for developing Mario 64 – I always got the sense that it was somewhat lightweight in performance compared to the Indigo, but a very cool machine either way.