The collected works of vegac - Page 1

I guess I'll toss my opinion in here...

I've used just about every OS there is. OS/2 being the exception, but figure most BSD's, various distros of linux, Windows from 3.0 thru XP, BeOS, QNX... Mac OSX is one other exception which I'm unhappy about, but I haven't yet gotten the cash to pick up a PPC to try it out on, because form what I've seen it may replace some of my other machines.

Unfortunately, every one of those (with perhaps the exception of BeOS) left me feeling like it wasn't quite right. I dislike window's design, which leands me towards wanting a more unix-type (best way I can differentiate) OS. Linux is a pain in configuring often, between different distros, packages being setup to work properly with 1 but not others, and other general faults. To be honest, my unhappiness with Linux started back when there was the whole libc5 vs. glibc (aka libc6) problem happened between distros. The BSD's are somewhat better in my opinion, but still felt lacking, none of them could keep me using them. BeOS I love the most, and it is in my opinion the closest thing to a "perfect" OS I've ever used...except for its lack of hardware 3d support, which is essential with my work.

Then I got my O2... To be honest I've dreamed of owning one of these since I first read of them some many years ago (what, 6 or so?). Finally picked one up 3 months ago... Is it more powerful than my dual celeron Linux machine, or my 1.13ghz Laptop running XP? No way. Yet I still use it more than any of my other 4 machines here combined. I just, feels good. The hardware is stable, the OS is fairly stable, and I have things just working. Maybe part of my problem with other 'nix-type OS's (linux, *bsd) is that there's no standard interface, so I found myself constantly fighting and reconfiguring trying to find one I like. With Irix, I just use what I have been given, and it works well enough for me to not want to change it, and lets me focus on just getting things done.

To sum it up, no it's not faster than a PC you could build for the same amount of money, but the general design is just so much better, in my opinion, that it makes up for it. And, it allows me to do whatever I need to do with it. I can get 99% of my work done on it and that's good enough for me.

Now, I definately wouldn't say that I'm a linux hater...
Just like I wouldn't say that any Linux distribution is by default more secure than my Irix install. Most Linux distros ALSO ship with a LOT of unneccessary daemons running. It's up to the person that admin's the machine to make sure it's secure.

SSH was available for Irix for a while now, and just because it didn't SHIP with the OS doesn't mean it's not there. And, if you'll watch those Bugtraq posts, you'll notice most of the bugs they post are involving old versions of the OS. I've seen only 1 so far that affects my machine, and even then it doesn't because I'm not running sendmail. (And note, that sendmail flaw effects every OS, so you can't call that an Irix bug).

Why does the filesystem layout annoy you? I mean, ya it's different from OpenBSD/Linux, but that doesn't make it any worse...it's a matter of training, and you were simply "trained" to be used to the layout BSD uses.

Really the rest of your comments are just opinions (4dwm is ugly, etc) that some will agree with, and some will disagree with. One thing I'll say about 4dwm is, it works, and I haven't felt the need to spend hours upon hours tweaking it. And plus, if you don't like it, run KDE, or Blackbox(fluxbox?), or WindowMaker, or whatever, noone's forcing you to use 4dwm, it's just the default.

Well, the first thing you need, is to get a copy of a game's ROM images
(How, don't ask, if you don't own the arcade board and copy the roms yourself it's technically illegal)

Second, you need to tell XMame what game to play (as you can tell by the filenames there, if you don't give it one, it tries to load up pacman)...

you'll likely need to pass some arguments to xmame as well
telling it where to find the roms and what-not

Ok, so, as some of you know, I recently picked up an Octane for rediculously cheap off of eBay ($75 to be exact)

As with all things in life - it seems as though it was too good to be true.

I had it set up, power cord, video adapter (13w3->vga) plugged in to my monitor, keyboard and mouse, and tried turning it on...

It has no harddrive, but I don't think that would be the problem.

It would look like it was "trying" to find the video, but failing...or something like that

The monitor would show it's "no signal" screen, which would then go black as if it had a signal, then back to the no signal screen again a few times, and the light bar would go red...

Is there a list of things that cause the bar to go red, or is it just ANY error on bootup - also any ideas about the video?

My first guess is the whole sync-on-green issue and the 13w3->vga adapter, but from what I've read the O2 requires sync-on-green also, and my monitor runs with that just fune.

Well...
I borrowed the HD from my O2, just to have a drive attached...
The light came up red, but then after the drive would spin up would turn back to the normal light color...

Video still isn't initializing, though it seems like it's trying to
I'm just unsure at this point if it's the SI card, or the 13w3->vga adapter, or my monitor not liking it...

If it was the SI card, I wouldn't think that it would atleast TRY initializing it (I can see the monitor try to init, go black, then fail and go back to the "no signal" screen)

If it was the 13w3->vga adapter, well, I don't know maybe that's what it is, but it specifically said it was for SGI's on the packaging...though that probably doesn't mean much.

For my monitor, it'll handle any res I've EVER thrown at it, upwards of 1920x1440 (at 72hz) - it's a KDS Avitron (basically a re-branded Sony Trinitron). So I don't *think* that's what it is...but again I'm not really sure.

At this point I'm just hoping for any bits of info because I don't want to be throwing money on things that aren't needed...and more importantly, I've had it for a while now - I just want to see it boot

Further investigations...

If I hit escape while the Octane is booting and then 5 (for the mini-shell whatever it's called) and type in commands, it seems to be doing something...

such as typing in init and hitting enter, seems to have it re-initialize the hardware (it tries to re-init the video apparently), but then maybe that's just something else, not really sure...it could just be a sort of placebo effect, I'm hoping it'll do something so I perceive it as doing something...

I guess in a few hours I'll go *all* the way across the street to Best Buy and grab a serial cable...

I'd really love to have this thing up and running today
And hey, turns out I DO have a sled, it was in the box under some more packaging, so I'm just going to keep the drive from the O2 for now I guess

---

As for the serial cable, I need a null modem cable like the old PC days of hooking up a PC to another, or a straight-thru? I'm guessing a null modem but I'd like to be sure if possible

Well, it seems I was mistaken and my monitor does NOT in fact support sync-on-green, and the O2 doesn't always use it by default which is why that worked but not the Octane...

Looking over some lists I found my monitor is listed as specifically NOT supporting sync-on-green, which would explain it.

I finally got in to the Octane with my iPaq (compaq handheld)
running linux instead of pocket PC...it's about time I found a use for that thing; serial connections to systems

Just want to thank you all for your help, and well, pray that my fiance doesn't kill me when I walk in with a new monitor one of these days

I know Neko has a 20" Philips that works with his Octane...
So I'd imagine the 17" Philips would as well? Atleast that's what I'm hoping when I pick one up this coming weekend...

Just make sure it supports sync-on-green and you should be ok.

Well, my CURRENT plan is to go down to Frys this Friday morning (I love direct deposit! don't have to wait to get my money) and hopefully pick up an LCD to replace my big 19" CRT...I figure I'm already used to 1280x1024, so going to an LCD will be alright...

though it's too bad I can't afford that 20" beast that'll do 1600x1200

The reasoning for the refresh rate thing is the LCD response time
Most have a response time of 16ms, which comes out to be 60hz...
While they'll deal with 72 or 75 or higher rates, the pixels themselves cannot refresh faster than that, and that's when you get a lot of the ghosting and other issues...

Ahh, good job

I had wanted to do the textureless changes you mentioned to me back when I prepared a tardist for this but I had just been overworked as of late and unable to do it to my tardist - glad to see someone step up and get it done

Well let me see here...

I have:
SGI O2 (Acting as webserver)
SGI Octane (Awaiting an OS install, not sure what it'll do)

P75 (FreeBSD, Acting as DNS server)
Celeron 667 (FreeBSD, Fileserver)
Dual Celeron 466 (FreeBSD, Currently down, not knowing why it randomly shut off)
Duron 1.3ghz (WinXP, Main work/desktop machine)
Dell 1.13ghz Laptop (WinXP, For when working up in the Bay Area)
P2 233 (Friend's Box, FreeBSD server for him, web email etc.)

Here's a small thing that seems unnecessary with most iconbars I've seen...dynamic resizing!

When you mouse over an icon it zooms up, that I like...what gets me is that the bar resizes, pushing all the other icons out a bit...

The reasons I'm against this are:
1) Seems like unnecessary work...all those pixmaps have to be moved, redrawn etc
2) If you then try to go to the next icon over, a lot of times you'll go TWO icons over, because you leave your icon, it shrinks the bar back down, and now you're further over than you would have been...it's an issue of trying to hit a moving target so to speak
3) Biggest reason, is it causes slowdown (not only in your iconbar, but in pretty much every icon bar I've tried, including on my 1+ ghz PC...)

Now, not trying to bash what you've done, really that's my only functionality complaint in an otherwise nice app

Next question is, are you going to take this to a further level with integrated pager, clock,etc. or leave it strictly an icon bar and let other programs deal with that other stuff?

Minimizing Launch does in fact just show the generic icon, BUT when I ran launch the iconbar didn't seem to have any problems...

I'm guessing the problem with the screenshot thing is that it's trying to take a shot in a specific format and you have a different video format, or something to that nature?

I'll give it a go compiling the latest from source and see what results I get...

---edit---

I just compiled it mips4 optimized with MIPSPro

I get that same error as you loading the classic art-set, BUT I get menu screens and the arena walls even so. The error I'm guessing is either a bad .png, or a bug in the freeware libpng...

You can try changing the art set at the menus
(if you don't see ANY menus at all, not just the background pics, do this:
down and then enter (to select Video)
enter to select texture options
enter to change the texture set

Classis is the only one that gives me those errors, so maybe you'll have luck w/ another set?


As for performance:
On my 175mhz R10k O2 I get about 15fps with the window size set to 640x480, turning off mipmapping, turning off trail transparency, and switching shadows to stencil

There's 2 things in the configure script that break it heh
first, search through there for the text "-Wall" and remove it
second, search through there for -O$ (and there's text following) and remove that (including whatever text is after the $ sign, I can't remember what it was called

After configure's done, you'll get errors in lua/src/lib (and possibly other places) about -Wall, edit the makefiles in whatever dir that's in and remove the -Wall and try again

Then, you get to go through most of the .c and .h files, removing the comments with //, because // is NOT VALID C CODE!

Then, after all that, you should be ok

That bootable cd option in gCombust is, I'm sure, just enabling the El Torito (like the nachos!) extension, which means you can put a floppy disk image as a boot-up (loaded in to ram like off of a floppy and booted) - it's used mainly by PC's.

For installation CD's, I *THINK* they're just a standard EFS cd, with /dist, and /dist/miniroot, and it'll look in /dist/miniroot for the proper kernel and what not (and /stand might also have to be there)

It's time like these I have to say, net-booting is your friend.
It really makes things a lot easier if you have a seperate machine you can run bootp, tftp, and nfs on.

I'm very much so envious...

I think these boosts in cpu speed are really what we need to be more viable as a desktop platform, and especially the O2, while not a 3d beast, I think it works quite well for a small all-in-one machine for desktop Irix use, that is, if you have a decent speed cpu.

Unfortunately my O2 is a mere 175mhz r10k, so it's been delegated to Webserver duties for the time being

For my O2 (175mhz R10k) this would be a HUGE increase in speed, and also a huge asset, as upgrades for those machines are expensive, if you can find them.

Octanes on the other hand, a 300mhz R12k can be gotten for about 400-500 (and this from resellers) so I don't know if the price and work involved would really end up saving you much...just on a time-basis (though I may be wrong here, if it IS just a few resistors to de-solder/re-solder and swapping out a chip that's under $200...)

That build of LAME he posted is a MIPS4 binary (r5k, r10k, r12k, etc.). your r4400 is only mips3, and therefore won't be able to run it.

Best option would be find out what he did to compile it and reproduce that work but with -mips3 set instead of -mips4

Here's a bug I've noticed that I'm not sure about...

In Gaim it grabs the icons from the WM_HINT, but the icons come out corrupted looking. I'm THINKING that this is because the icons have transparency in them but I could be wrong here. Any ideas what this might be?

For now I just disabled grabbing icons from the hint and forcing it to use a file and that's working, but figured I'd ask...

Well, I know that the .png in /usr/local/share/pixmaps has transparency....
I'm using an Octane with SI+Tram, not VPro, so that cancels that issue out. What I've noticed is sometimes it would grab the icon properly (with a black background), and othertimes it would grab it with the background randomly colored (the main logo looking right, but instead of a black background, garbage).

Windows opened up would also have messed up icons, most likely from their buddy-icons (which are animated gifs) being messed up though.

I just switched the code on my machine to go file, then WM_HINT...always err on the side of letting the user override the machine. This way I can set my own icons for things such as XMMS (which uses a very small icon by default)

I took a screenshot of my iconbar for you so you can see...maybe it will give you some ideas...

http://www.kolrabi.com/iconbar.png

Notice the "garbage" behind the buddy list icon, the weirded out Nekochan icon, and the garbage behind the last icon there (buddy icon, name blurred for his protection heh) but the people on there are ok, it's just everything else that would be transparent isn't...

nekonoko wrote: OT - just curious - I noticed lots of people blur out their buddy icons and contacts (I don't, heh) - why is that? Has anyone actually been IM spammed from someone trying to manually type in buddies off posted screenshots? :cat:

I think of it more as a common courtesy and the fact that well, do I really want to admit talking to this guy?

Gaim is version 0.71 (compiled myself)
XMMS is 1.2.8

The nekochan icon I'm not sure what is up with it...but I did disable the default.icon usage when I put file-selection before WM_HINT selection for the icons, so that's probably what that is?

For the transparency, I'm not sure what it is...as Pixmaps (as far as I know) don't support transparency, except maybe through an XBitmap...but really no clue there. I'll see if I can throw in some test code to get more info about the gaim icon...atleast what bitdepth it reports as, etc.

Not a reply on a bug but instead a feature I've "added"...

I edited reximage.c (rewrote most of it).

The code is a lot smaller, simpler, and while at it, 24/32 bit icons are now "smoothly" scaled instead of "roughly"...

To get an idea:

Before:

After:

Also the checks for a valid XImage and such are done before allocating a spare drawable (which is, in fact, not even used anymore).

If you want my copy of reximage.c let me know, I'll gladly donate it if you like.

Also I'm working on adding checking for the alpha's of 32bit icons (should they come in) from WM_HINTs to see if that is the cause of the corrupted icons I'm seeing from some apps...

-Bryan

Another fun fix:

I fixed the transparency issue!

Basically, you check the WM_HINT for IconMask, get that as an image, check it's pixels if it's set to 0 it's transparent and therefore you fill in the pixel in the actual image with the background color (I'm using the default of 0x787878).

I'll sign up for a sourceforge login and send you a private message with the info in a few minutes...

Is it just me, or in that twister, are those polys supposed to be front-facing? I'm guessing this is what the crossVec takes care of (rotating based on camera view to display front-facing?) or are they actually supposed to be almost lines like that?

Well now, I'll be approaching this topic mostly as a game developer...

OpenGL and DirectX (well, Direct3d) aren't really that different these days...

GL has glEnable(GL_WHATEVER), direct3d has pD3D->SetRenderState(DRS_WHATEVER, TRUE)

Both are just ways to render polygons on screen. In fact in terms of game development it's even more moot than it used to be, because a lot of work is now done in shaders (vertex and pixel) which both translate pretty much 1:1 between the 2 apis.

Personally, I prefer OpenGL because I like it's syntax and I'm more accustomed to it, but Direct3d 8 and 9 are both very useable too. It largely depends on if you're working from a current codebase which you'd choose.

To correct some mistakes in this thread:
Direct3d emulates just as well missing features as OpenGL, only difference is in direct3d, 1 company making it means that emulation is the same everywhere...you don't see OpenGL emulating multitexturing on our sgis do you? Nope...

Direct3d generally has a more powerful feature-set than base OpenGL, but OpenGL has a nice extension mechanism that allows card manufacturers the ability to support new functionality immediately (which allows programmers to start using that functionality immediately instead of waiting for a new direct3d revision). This is good and bad as the standardization of these features often takes time and the api for the features will often change a bit...

Taking directX as a whole now, it's more than a 3d api, it offers directdraw (which I don't think ANYONE uses...), but also a central set of apis for sound, input, etc. which OpenGL doesn't have (and shouldn't, it's a fricken graphics api).

For the Carmack quote, that was referring to Direct3d 5 (I think) back when there was Immediate mode and retained mode, and neither was good for everything...since then direct3d's structure has become infinitely nicer.

And well, to finish this off simply: As a game developer, it doesn't matter what API I'm using, nor does it matter what language I'm programming in, they all work the same in the end, they all have benefits and drawbacks, and if people are wasting time worrying about language and api, who's worrying about the game?