Re: [Update REQ 5246]: X-geomview 1.5.0 visual support

["Tim Rowley" <trowley>]

> My platform is a PC running Linux with XFree86 3.1.1.  It seems common that
> X servers for PC compatible machines don't simultaneously support >= 15
> plane and 8 plane visuals at the same time; I've noticed this on servers
> for both the S3 and Mach64 video cards.  Perhaps its a hardware limitation?

I seem to recall reading that at least one of the major chipsets
does have support for different visuals at the same time.  It
probably complicates the X server implementation, though.
Anyway, it's a mixed blessing -- the 24bit X version of geomview
had strange bugs for quite some time because we only tested on
SGIs, which happily support different visual depths
simultaneously.

>   I began making the changes for >= 15 plane support, but couldn't compile
> geomview because it needed the Motif libraries.  If you could make use of
> diffs let me know and I'll complete what I can without being able to test
> my changes and send the diffs to you this weekend.  (Although there isn't
> much to my diffs, geomview was well written enough for the changes to be
> minor.)

I would be quite interested in looking at your code.  I was
considering writing code to support 16bit visuals, but I only had
one example of one -- a NeXT running coXist.  It's visual uses a
color weighting of 444, which is atypical.  We now have a linux
box which can run in 16bit mode, so we should be able to start
working on this.  Unfortunately my machine at home has a cirrus
card which doesn't want to do linear mapping, otherwise I would
have worked on this before.

If you don't have Motif, you can still test your code with the
program in ${GEOM}/src/bin/mgexample.  It's a mg test program
which just loads an object and spins it around.

-- 
Tim Rowley  --  trowley at geom.umn.edu  --  "Do or do not, there is no try."