2 Mesa / BeOS Information
8 Brian Paul added in Mesa 3.1 a driver for BeOS R4.5 operating system.
9 This driver implements a clone of the BGLView class. This class,
10 derived from BView, allows OpenGL rendering into any BeOS window. His
11 driver was updated in Mesa 4.1 and again in version 6.1 by Philippe
12 Houdoin, who's maintaining this driver since.
14 Any application which uses the BGLView should be able to use Mesa
15 instead of Be's OpenGL without changing any code.
17 Since Be's OpenGL implementation (as of R5) is basically just the
18 SGI sample implementation, it's pretty slow. You'll see that Mesa
19 is considerably faster.
24 The source code for the driver is in src/mesa/drivers/beos/ directory.
25 It's not 100% finished at this time but many GLUT-based demos are
26 working. No optimizations have been made at this time.
31 Since Mesa 6.x, it can be build under BeOS with both the R5 builtin gcc version
32 or more recent gcc versions available for BeOS, like this gcc version 2.95.3 for BeOS
33 you can find at http://www.bebits.com/app/2157.
34 Anyway, keep in mind that to take full advantage of Mesa x86 optimizations, you better
35 want to use gcc 2.95.3 or sooner versions...
37 To build Mesa-powered BeOS libGL.so version, open an Terminal window,
38 move to Mesa root folder and type this command:
42 Note that the "beos" argument is only needed the first time to setup build config.
43 Next times, typing "make" will be enough.
45 When it finishes the Mesa based libGL.so library for
46 BeOS will be in the lib/ directory, along libglut.so library.
47 Several demo/test programs should have been build too under progs/* folders.
48 If it stop when building one of the progs/* programs, you may want to ignore it
49 and force make to move on next target by adding the -k make option:
54 To install it as Be's default libGL.so replacement, put it in your
55 /boot/home/config/lib/ directory. All your GL/GLUT apps will use
58 By default, it build a non-debug version library.
59 The x86 (MMX, SSE and 3DNOW) optimizations are also supported for x86 target.
60 For PowerPC BeOS flavor, sorry, Mesa don't have ppc (Altivec) optimizations
63 To build a DEBUG version, type instead this :
70 Look under progs/beos/ for some BGLView-based programs.
71 You should find under progs/samples and progs/redbook directories GLUT-based programs too.
72 They all should have been compiled along with the Mesa library.
77 A beta version of GLUT 3.7 port for BeOS, made by Jake Hamby, can be found at
78 http://anobject.com/jehamby/Code/Glut-3.7-x86.zip.
79 This is the version currently included in Mesa source code, and
80 build in lib/libglut.so.
82 A previous 3.5 version of this GLUT BeOS port used to be available at
83 http://home.beoscentral.com/jehamby/Glut-3.5-x86.zip.
85 They're special versions of GLUT for the BeOS platform. I don't
86 believe Mark Kilgard's normal GLUT distribution includes BeOS
92 Mesa's implementation of the BGLView class has an extra member
93 function: CopySubBufferMESA(). It basically works like SwapBuffers()
94 but it only copies a sub region from the back buffer to the front
95 buffer. This is a useful optimization for some applications.
96 If you use this method in your code be sure that you check at runtime
97 that you're actually using Mesa (with glGetString) so you don't
98 cause a fatal error when running with Be's OpenGL.
103 - BDirectWindow single buffering support is not implemented yet.
104 - Color index mode is not implemented yet.
105 - Reading pixels from the front buffer not implemented yet.
106 - There is also a BGLScreen class in BeOS for full-screen OpenGL rendering.
107 This should also be implemented for Mesa.
108 - Multiple renderers add-ons support, first step toward hardware acceleration
111 * Other contributors to this BeOS port
113 Jake Hamby jhamby <at> anobject <dot> com
114 Marcin Konicki ahwayakchih <at> neoni <dot> net
115 Francois Revol revol <at> free <dot> fr
116 Nathan Whitehorn nathanw <at> uchicago <dot> edu
121 Mesa 2.6 had an earlier BeOS driver. It was based on Mesa's Off-screen
122 rendering interface, not BGLView. If you're interested in the older
123 driver you should get Mesa 2.6.
128 Mesa 3.0 supported the 3Dfx/Glide library on Beos. Download Mesa 3.0
129 if interested. Ideally, the 3Dfx/Glide support should be updated to
130 work with the new Mesa 3.1 BGLView implementation.
132 The Glide library hasn't been updated for BeOS R4 and newer, to my knowledge,
133 as of February, 1999.
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