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