HOW TO GET STEREO ENABLED WITH OPENGL BOARDS ON WINDOWS NT 4.0 ----------------------------------------------- 1) Load the latest driver from the board manufacturer. It is still very common for the drivers originally supplied with the video board package to not contain correct stereo support, so we strongly recommend going to the manufacturer's web site to get the current driver. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO INSTALL DRIVER FILES BY SIMPLY COPYING OVER EXISTING DISPLAY DRIVER FILES. To load the driver: First unzip the driver files into a temporary directory. Then bring up the Control Panel, choose "Display", click "Settings" and then "Display Type". From that dialog box, click "Change", and then "Have Disk". Click "Browse" and use the resulting file dialog box to locate the temporary directory that contains the new driver files. Finally, select the driver installation file, which will have a file extension ".inf", and click "Open" (or, in some cases, just run a self-installing executable file, if the driver is configured in that form). Follow further installation instructions when prompted. Then, restart your system. 2) Some OpenGL stereo boards only work in certain video modes. Also, some stereo boards require that you take an extra configuration step to enable the stereo capabilities. Please follow the special instructions below that pertain to your OpenGL board: a) DIAMOND FIREGL 1000 PRO (www.diamondmm.com): Go to Display Settings (Control Panel, "Display", "Settings"), and change the display mode to one of the following: 800 x 600 x 65536 colors, 640 x 480 x 65536 colors, or 640 x 480 x 16777216 colors, with a refresh frequency of 100 Hz or more (or as high as you can get it to work if your system has difficulty displaying at the higher frequencies). Stereo will NOT work with this board using other display modes, such as 1024 x 768, or 256-color modes. Then, go back to the Control Panel again and select "Display", followed by "Diamond Configuration". Under the "Configuration Profiles" section of the dialog box pane, select "3D Stereo Support (2nd Z-Buffer)". DO NOT select the "3D Stereo Support" selection above that, since most stereo implementations do require a separate Z-Buffer for each eye's view. Finally, click "OK", and restart the system. b) DYNAMIC PICTURES OXYGEN: From the Windows "Start" menu, select "Programs"/ "Oxygen3D"/ "Control Panel". From this special control panel, choose the "Advanced Options" panel, and check the box next to "Show stereo modes in control panel". Then, check the "Memory Options" panel to make sure that the "Z-Buffer" selection is set to something other than "None". Click "OK" to close that dialog box. Next, bring up the regular Display Settings panel (Control Panel, "Display", "Settings"), and select a resolution of 1024 x 768, with a sync rate of 105 Hz or greater. c) ELSA GLORIA XL, XXL (www.elsa.de): These Elsa OpenGL boards support stereo in most available display resolutions. To obtain a choice of resolutions that support stereo, go into the "Gloria Settings" panel of the "Display" section of Control Panel, and click the radio button marked "Offer 3D Resolutions Only". For the best quality display, go to Display Settings (Control Panel, "Display", "Settings"), and choose one of the higher available sync rates, 100 Hz or higher if available. d) INTERGRAPH REALIZM and INTENSE 3D PRO (www.intergraph.com): In the Display control panel (Control Panel, "Display"), select the "Intergraph Settings" panel, and then click "Advanced". Check "Enable Stereo Display", and then select the radio button labeled "Frame Sequential". For the best quality display, go into the regular Display Settings panel (Control Panel, "Display", "Settings"), and choose one of the higher available sync rates. e) DIAMOND FIREGL 4000 (www.diamondmm.com): This board supports stereo only via special Diamond extensions to OpenGL. Thus, standard OpenGL stereo software will only work with this board if it was specifically designed to. (The test program below in step 3 will not work with this board.) For detailed information about programming for the Diamond FireGL 4000, see "diamond_firegl.zip", in the "Developers" directory at ftp.stereographics.com. Additional information may also be available at www.diamondmm.com. 3) Remember that increasing the sync rate, to 120 Hz or above if possible, will always improve the stereoscopic viewing comfort. Note that, in some cases, changing the "Monitor Type" (under "Change Display Type" from the Display Settings dialog) will sometimes affect the available selection of sync rates. In some cases, we've actually found that changing the "Monitor Type" setting can affect whether stereo modes are available at all at certain display resolutions. You should restart your system after reconfiguring the graphics settings. 4) To test stereo mode on your system, try out two test programs, "RedBlue" and "OGLPlane": From DOS prompt, change to the directory where you want to download to, activate your Internet connection, and type "ftp ftp.stereographics.com", then log in as "anonymous", type your e-mail address as your password, change directory "cd Developers", select download mode by typing "binary", and then download the files by typing "get redblue.exe" and "get oglplane.exe" (download the .zip versions instead if you also want full source code). Finally, "quit" the ftp session. Run "RedBlue" first. If your system is set up to support stereo, you should see a blue rectangle in one eye and a red rectangle in the other. With the glasses off, the overlap region should appear violet. Next, try "OGLPlane", which draws a simple stereo image to the screen. If you like, another more interesting stereo test "scrsave.zip", is also available from our ftp site. This is a Windows screensaver: Put the unzipped file into your \winnt\system folder and then select it as your screensaver from the "Display Properties" Control Panel dialog box, and then test it out. 5) If the above steps failed to get stereo working for you, please examine all hardware connections. The emitter should be firmly plugged into the connector on the OpenGL card. Check through all of the above steps to make sure that stereo is configured properly, and that you are in a compatible display mode. -Bob Akka & Andy Ramm StereoGraphics Corporation 7/30/98