SGI: Computer Graphics

Does anyone know if PA v8.5 will run on VPro graphics? Read on some obscure website that only MGRAS was supported, but just wanted to be sure.

it won't. the 8.5 release was particularly picky. not even the renderers work with 6.5.15 or higher. didn't try older 6.5 versions tho.
9 and 8.2 are okay although there're some glitches with vpro.
you might wanna use studiotools 9.x which still has all features of PA but runs better on the late irix machines.

and welcome here btw

Thanks for the reply and the warm welcome!

Actually it probably will. (I have power animator 7.5.1 running on a tezro V12 - IRIX 6.5.28).

I spent a bit of time getting this working because all I had in my possession was PA7.5.1 media ;<

Requires a couple of hacks though.
I can provide detailed instructions if your willing to go through the pain.
Basic steps: (I can provide more detail if necessary)

We will fake an older card by replacing its GL_RENDERER string that gets reported back to the application.
Basically we will be tricking PA into thinking its on an older graphics system.

a. Make a copy of your opengl core dll/so (mine was in /usr/gfx/arch/IP53ODSY/ or something like that).
b. there will be 2 so files - I forgot the exact name and my machine is inaccessible at the moment, you will want the one with 'core' in it. we will refer to this below as <glcorethingy>
c. using hexedit from nekoware - hexedit the copy of the glcore dll not the original!
d. search (in the ascii side) for VPRO - you will see something like "VPRO/%s/%b%s"
e. replace with "GU1-Extreme" taking special care that the string remains null terminated (and that we don't overflow the original size of the string).
f. theoretically this could be replaced with other renderer strings so long as they fit in the original space of the string.
g. place this so file in a tidy location, something like ~/alias_hack/<glcorethingy>.so
h. in general this technique can be used to trick an app into thinking its running on older graphics system than it actually is. No it will not magically give you features your graphics system does not have. This was also not extensively tested, but it seemed to work fine for this specific use case..

Make a shell script "run_alias.sh" in the ~/alias_hack folder

a. I use bash - so in my case I would add to this script:
#!/usr/nekoware/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/alias_hack
/usr/alias9610/bin/Alias

b. chmod it - "chmod u+x ~/alias_hack/run_alias.sh"

PA 7.5 had trouble renderering because it could not find it's renderer binary

a. it was looking for something like 'renderer6.5k' on my machine.
b. well there was this renderer6.4k and renderer5.3k file present...
c. solution! : copy or symlink one (preferably the one with the higher number of course!) to the one its looking for. viola - rendering occurs!
d. you probably will want to replicate the same pattern for the raytracer and power variant renderer binaries
e. this leaves me wondering if they were just appending the irix version to 'renderer' to locate a specific binary. was there even an IRIX 6.4?

Sorry the instructions are a bit fuzzy (Im recalling them from memory)
I can provide more exacting detailed instructions later this weekend.
More than likely these steps could be automated via a shell/python/etc script - but I will leave that for someone else to do...

Also sorry for the poor formatting - I will revisit when I get a little more time..

Next step - getting it running in the mame/mess ip22 driver! (I'm only half joking - If only had more free time...)

tweakoz wrote: b. there will be 2 so files - I forgot the exact name and my machine is inaccessible at the moment, you will want the one with 'core' in it. we will refer to this below as <glcorethingy>
c. using hexedit from nekoware - hexedit the copy of the glcore dll not the original!
d. search (in the ascii side) for VPRO - you will see something like "VPRO/%s/%b%s"
e. replace with "GU1-Extreme" taking special care that the string remains null terminated (and that we don't overflow the original size of the string).

ha, now that's neat. never figured that something this trivial would be enough
much thanks for sharing

PA 7.5 had trouble renderering because it could not find it's renderer binary

in case of 8.5 it's not just an issue of the binary's name i'm afraid. the renderers just crash. the same goes for v9. v8.2 is fine tho.

was there even an IRIX 6.4?

yes
but in this case the 6.4k postfix means irix6 and r4000 (and higher)

quick addition to this:

there was an aw_expiry patch available once for 8.5 and 9 in particular. that one fixes most of the serious problems i had however i didn't try it with 6.5.x nor vpro