[Techtalk] I want Tux Racer dangit

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 10:35, Carla Schroder wrote:
> Sad tale of woe: all I want is to play Tux Racer. Such a simple want. However 
> I need hardware acceleration enabled. Hmph. God hates me, the fates are 
> against me, and even my cat has attitude because of this.
> 
> video card: Voodoo 3 1000

Are you sure here? I've never heard of a Voodoo 3 1000, only of a Voodoo
_2_ 1000 and of Voodoo 3 _2000_,_3000_ and _3500_.

> OS: RH8 
> other specs on request
> 
> Originally resolution was set at 1024x768, 24 bit. After YEARS of futzing with 
> this stupid thing, and lsmod shows ZERO video drivers loaded, and glxinfo 
> shows DRI not working, I look in the XFreeakin server logs. Well lo and 
> beholden, in wee tiny type, it says tdfx driver not loaded, and DRI not 
> enabled, 'cause they won't work at 32bpp. Windows can handle up to 1024x768, 
> 32 bit and full acceleration, no problem, but hey, it does no good to argue.

Hmm, I'm very sure that you only get 16bit accelerated 3D on Windows,
too, because the Voodoo 3 can only do accelerated 3D with 16bit color
depths (HW limitation) and the XFree86 driver can only use DRI with
resolutions of up to 1024x768. Probably the Windows driver exploits the
ability to switch color depths on the fly to do this.

> After cussing something awful, man, you shoulda been there, I change to 
> 1024x768, 16 bit. OK, this time X is happy, the log reports
> 
> "(II) LoadModule: "tdfx"
> (II) Loading /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers/tdfx_drv.o
> (II) Module tdfx: vendor="The XFree86 Project"
> (II) TDFX(0): [drm] created "tdfx" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0""
> 
> Yay! I dance for joy. Fire up Tux Racer, and boom! No Tux Racer, and I am 
> slammed into 640x480 with a groovy sliding desktop. Sheee.
> 
> I take a I hate Linux break.
> 
> OK. After the break, I restart X, run glxinfo, and it says
> 
> "gd error (glide): gd error (glide): grSstSelect:  non-existent SSTgd error 
> (glide): grSstSelect:  non-existent SSTSegmentation fault"
> 
> At 1024x768, 24 bit, glxinfo spits out all kinds of data, the pertinent bit 
> being
> 
> " OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect"
>
> So why would changing the color depth cause it to pitch such a fit?

Looks like the driver tells you "I'll do software rendering". No
surprise since the Voodoo 3 can accelerate 3D only in 16bit color
depths. Really.

> The EXTREMELY lame RH8 'redhat-config-xfree86' is useless. Might as well edit 
> Xfree86 config by hand. Xconfigurator was such a lovely utility, it does not 
> come with RH8. I may download and try it next.
> 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/README.DRI has a lot of interesting-looking 
> information. 
> 
> but still....
> 
> THIS SUCKS!!!
> 
> what the HELL is the matter with dommed Red Hat, anyway! This is freaking 
> 2002, I think it is time for this sort of drama to be a thing of the past. If 
> Mandrake and SuSE can enable hardware acceleration out of the box, why cannot 
> the esteamed RH itself.
> 
> Any useful ideas, and or complementary tantrums, are welcome.

I'm sure that it doesn't help you much that most of the few 3D hardware
I could lay my hands on works "out of the box" (among them a Voodoo 3
3000, notable exception an Nvidia Riva128).

Please post (or mail in private) a complete XFree log, your XF86Config
(or XF86Config-4 in case you have upgraded from an older version of Red
Hat Linux) and output of 'lspci -v', 'lsmod', 'ls -l /usr/lib/*glide*'
'ls -l /dev/dri*', 'uname -a', 'cat /proc/mtrr' and 'cat /proc/cpuinfo'
(after starting X in 1024x768 at 16bpp). You might as well put in your
versions of the XFree86 and Glide3 packages for good measure.

Nils
-- 
Nils Philippsen / Berliner Straße 39 / D-71229 Leonberg //
+49.7152.209647
   nils at wombat.dialup.fht-esslingen.de / nils at redhat.de / nils at lisas.de
   PGP fingerprint:  C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011
       Ever noticed that common sense isn't really all that common?
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