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by Silicon Graphics Inc.
www.opengl.org

Introduction Welcome to the main page of the OpenGL CPA! CPA stands for Control Panel Application. This is a Win32 application and should work under all versions of Windows. After installing this software, you will have an icon in your "Control Panel", just like the icon you have after installing DirectX. Right about now, I think you understood why this software exists. OpenGL doesn't really have much of an appearance under Windows, unless you are talking about the old screen savers produced by Microsoft (3D Pipes, 3D FlowerBox, 3D Maze, 3D Flying Objects , 3D Text). Windows XP hasn't made things any easier. Anyways, this is not a replacement for those screen savers. This is intended to give the average user some information about their video card and their OpenGL drivers. It also contains a few demoes, tests and benchmarks. At this point in time , there isn't anything fantastic in there. This software is still in its early stages. As time goes by, I will add parts, and implement any ideas I come up with. Be patient! Finally, the download link is to the left. It is about 2.4MB ZIP file. It includes the setup.exe file and other necessary files. This product does not work on Win 2000, Win XP and future versions. It will work on Win98, Me, WinNT 4.0, and possibly Win95 (Never tested). Thank you, V-man

Some Information and System Requirements The information presented by the main window of the CPA comes from the OpenGL drivers you have installed on your system. If you haven't installed any drivers for your video card, then Windows will install something from its own library files. Most likely, that something doesn't include an OpenGL driver. In this case, any software you run that uses OpenGL will run in software (OpenGL32.dll in you System directory). Unfortunaly, the OpenGL version for OpenGL32.dll is 1.1 and doesn't include too many extensions. The CPA requires 1.2 (and maybe even 1.3) for some of the demoes. What will happen is that some demoes will not execute and you will have a black screen. Be sure to visit your video card vendor, implementor, chip manufacturer or whatever web site and download the appropriate drivers. I'm sure that you have tried running 1 or 2 games and received the message "Couldn't load OpenGL subsystem". Install the video cards drivers and you'll be able to play. It's also a good idea to uninstall previous version before installing. The CPA requires : Any Windows version (95, 95b, NT4, 98, 98SE, ME) (It does not work on 2000 and XP for now) A P5 class x86 processor (Pentium, Pentium MMX, K5, K6, etc.) 20MB of RAM <5MB of hard disk space It's good to have a recent video card. Some old cards have driver bugs in which case you may have to switch to software mode to see the correct behavior.Certain modern cards have buggy drivers too! OpenGL32.dll in your System directory (should be present) Glu32.dll in your System directory (should be present) glhlib.dll in your System directory (will be installed) zlib.dll in your System directory (will be installed) ijl15.dll in your System directory (will be installed) libpng.dll in your System directory (will be installed) Product History (in Chrono Order) Version 1.00 Announced among developers at www.opengl.org for feeback (July 2002) Version 1.01 Corrected some problems with the installer. Made minor corrections. Announced among developers at www.opengl.org for feedback (July 2002) Screenshots and Functionality Discriptions Most of you don't need to read this section. This is for developers and software/hardware companies. So what does the icon look like? The Control Panel The next figure is the main window of the CPA. If you need to search for an extension, you can type the name or type a substring and presss enter or click on "Search". If found, you will see the extension highlighted in the list, else "Not Available" will be flashing in the search box. You may have noticed that there are some extra buttons here that are not available in your installation. That's because those buttons are hidden. You will have to type "open u" in the search box and press enter to make those buttons visible. To make them invisible again, type "close u". The main window If you click on benchmarks, a dialog pops up asking you for some settings to create the OpenGL window on which the demoes and tests will be rendered. The OpenGL window won't be resizeable, so this window offers you the option of choosing the dimensions. Try all the settings you want. Benchmarking - Initial Setup And now for some screenshots. The current version of the OpenGL CPA contains 4 demoes and tests. The texture_env_combine test has been made non-functional for retooling. The Shadows Demo works but the shadows have been turned off for now. The idea is to get some feedback from people to see if everything done so far works alright. I know that everything works as expected on my system. Even if I switch to software mode, everything works and I get no crashes or memory leaks. 3D Text Animation Texture Coordinate Generation Test Blending Test Texture Combine Test Shadows Demo To be able to integrate this software into your own, all you have to do is have a way to execute this application from within yours. ShellExecute(NULL, NULL, "control", "OpenGL32CPA.cpl", NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL); I suggest you put a command in your Help menu where it says "About OpenGL". If the software is not installed on a particular users machine, the call to ShellExecute will simply fail. Help menu Links www.opengl.org www.sgi.com/software/opengl/ oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ reality.sgi.com/opengl/tips/ www.sgi.com/software/opengl/advanced97/notes/ www.gamedev.net www.flipcode.com www.the-ctrl-alt-del.com glhlibrary.html (For the GLHLIBRARY DLL file) glu.html (For the GLU DLL file) www.tomshardware.com www.anandtech.com

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