VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 30 2003 - 11:03:20 CDT

Jerome,
  As Esben mentioned, you should see a red light on your emitter.
If you don't see the red light, then the video board isn't supplying power
(or you've got an incorrect cable or emitter type) to the emitter.
You should be certain that your hardware is working before you spend
much time worrying about VMD itself. If you don't get a red light, you'll
need to check that the emitter is compatible with the cabling on the
video board, and that you've got the video driver settings in place
to enable stereo. Most video boards don't send out power on the stereo
port unless the active video mode is actually stereo capable, so you
ought to be able to see the emitter go red even without VMD running.

If you determine that all is well with the hardware, then you need to
do the 'setenv VMDPREFERSTEREO 1' step before you run VMD. When VMD
starts, you should get "STEREO" listed as one of the OpenGL features
it found. If you don't see this, then the video driver is not providing
a stereo visual that VMD can use, for some reason. A potential cause of
that sort of problem could be attempting to run at too high of a display
resolution, as most NVidia video boards don't have enough video memory
to run in quad-buffered stereo at the highest resolutions, while also
providing stencil buffers, etc.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 04:13:20PM +0200, Jérôme Hénin wrote:
> Hi Esben,
>
> Thanks for answering. Setting the environement variable didn't change the
> behaviour of VMD. What you say about input voltage is interesting, since the
> emitter was used on a SGI before. But it did work on the PC when it was under
> Windows ! I don't understand that, but I'll try with a set designed for PCs.
>
> Jérôme
>
> Le Mardi 30 Septembre 2003 15:45, vous avez écrit :
> > Hi Jérôme
> >
> >
> > Try to set the environment variable VMDPREFERSTEREO before starting VMD,
> > ie:
> >
> > setenv VMDPREFERSTEREO (using csh or tcsh), or
> > export VMDPREFERSTEREO (using bash)
> >
> > Also, what kind of CrystalEyes are you using? Our sets are designed for use
> > with SGI equipment and requires +12V, whereas the VESA standard (used by
> > the Quadro cards) has +5V output. However, if this is the problem you
> > should still see a faint light in the stereo emitter LED.
> >
> >
> >
> > Best regards
> >
> > Esben
> >
>
> --
> Jérôme Hénin (33) 3 83 68 43 95
> Equipe Dynamique des Assemblages Membranaires
> Université Henri Poincaré / CNRS UMR 7565
>
> 

-- 
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