IRIX software
Yup, I helped out at a local lab once, they had some old data and a published paper that they wanted to run a followup on (process some new data using same techniques for a followup paper). Running the current software with the old data did not obtain the same results as in the paper (not a big change that'd change the conclusions, but still...). They had a copy of the binaries, but they were for IRIX, and the SGI it ran on had been retired. I did end up getting it to run -- Linux for MIPS intentionally picked the same system call numbers that IRIX did, and it was a simple console-based app (text prompts asking to set various parameters and what file to read the data from), so it actually ran on x86 linux using qemu-user-mips. The overhead of emulating the MIPS was more than offset by the x86 system being years newer and like 10 or 20x the clockspeed, it ran whatever it was doing in a few seconds (apparently it took about a minute on the original system.) It ran the old data with identical results to the paper (i.e. qemu was emulating properly), so they ran their new data with it and all was good.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
