[Chimera-users] Stereographics support

[Greg Couch]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Eduardo Sanz Garcia wrote:

> We've recently purchased a Stereographics E-2 Emitter to go with our Mac
> G5 equipped with an NVIDIA Quaddro FX 4500 Graphics Card.  As far as we
> know, the hardware is hooked up correctly, but when we try to run
> Chimera using command "./chimera --stereo", the following error appears:
>
> 'Unable to find hardware stereo support
> TOGL Couldn't get visual'
>
> We called the Stereographics company regarding this error and they
> mentioned that our software should have "blue line code" enabled.  They
> couldn't give me more details because they said they were unfamiliar
> with Chimera.  Could someone enlighten us with how we can get Chimera to
> run with stereo enabled?  Thanks.

Ignore the StereoGraphics comments in this case.  What StereoGraphics 
thought you we're talking about was stereo on other Apple graphics cards 
that only do full-screen stereo.  Chimera needs stereo-in-a-window support 
that is only on workstation-class graphics cards like the NVidia Quadro FX 
4500.

Unfortunately, the error message is correct.  Chimera on Mac OS X is 
currently a X11 application and stereo does not work under X11.  Please 
file a bug report with Apple.  If enough people file bug reports, maybe 
they'll fix it.  (To see that stereo is not supported, run the 
/usr/X11R6/bin/glxinfo command and see that there are no stereo-capabable 
visuals available.)

As a result we are working on an Aqua version of chimera (because stereo 
does work on the FX 4500).  Unfortunately, the Aqua version of our 
cross-platform GUI toolkit, Tcl/Tk, is very buggy (but not as buggy as it 
was 4 years ago when we last tried), so we're working on workarounds for 
the worst bugs so the Aqua version will be usable, although not up to par.

What this means for you is that sometime around to the end of June, there 
should be a newer Aqua snapshot release available for downloading that 
will work in stereo on Mac OS X, but a production release is a long ways 
off.

 	Greg Couch
 	UCSF Computer Graphics