A message from Doug Little.

[eonic man <eonicman@erols.com>]

OPEN GL FOR TOS


Doug Little, of Apex Media and Bad Mood fame has ported the OpenGL graphics
libraries to the atari! 

     For any Atarians out there who are interested in such things, I have
ported most of the Dos/Win32 version of the OpenGL 2D/3D graphics library to
the Atari platform! 

     I have built and am currently testing the following libraries under GCC
2.7.2: 

          OPENGL (main opengl graphics library) 
          GLU (main opengl portable utility library) 
          AUX (mostly portable extensions) 
          TK (platform-specific toolkit for windows, display output etc.) 

     There are small pieces of GLU and TK missing, but most of the demos
appear to link and work. Not all the demos do exactly what I'd expect them to,
but all 20 of them draw something visible on the screen, and without crashing.
Some of the demos work 100%. 

     There are two small problems however... :) 

     One of them is the fact that output is produced on a fullscreen display,
so no windowed access is supported. This means it's still useless on GFX cards
and will only work very well on the Falcon. 

     The second, and more serious problem is the final library - GLUT. It is
used by a great many OpenGL applications, and it's a bitch to port because
it's full of platform-specific and XWindows based stuff that I am not familiar with.
     If anyone wants to help me port this last chunk, please get in touch. 

     Here are links to versions of GLUT which make a good starting point for a
port: 

     Mesa library source (including multi-platform Mesa version of Glut): 

     http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~brianp/Mesa.html 

     Official Glut 3.7 for SGI, Win95 & NT: 

     http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/glut3/glut3.html 

     Any help is appreciated. It would be great to have all of OpenGL on the
Atari, especially if it can be upgraded and enhanced via GEM to run on any
Atari! 

     Doug. 

If you can help Doug with this exciting project, then mail him at: 

                        doug@innerworkings.co.uk