GameGLUT on Linux

I’m trying to figure out why GameGLUT doesn’t want to start up on my two (reasonably different) Linux machines.

The hardware (Radeon 7200 and 9700) is capable of acceleration in any resolution you like, but GameGLUT says that a mode string of “640x480” (among others) is “impossible”. It also refuses to enter game mode with a blank mode string.

Meanwhile, setting up a fullscreen window using standard GLUT3 routines seems to work fine. But this isn’t really what I want - I’m writing a simple utility at this stage, which is supposed to read out a variety of capability information and print it nicely, and some of the information has to do with what display modes are supported. (This is a precursor to a bigger project.)

Note that I haven’t tested the code under MacOS X or Windows yet, though I could.

If sample code snippets are needed to diagnose this one, I’ll be happy to post them.

Hello!

Have you tried GLFW ? It has nice fullscreen support (including a function for listing the available display modes).

ATI drivers suck in general but on linux theres no support. I have the 7500 on my laptop, the best you can get is DRI it really limits the card I have a nvidia geforce 2 mx and it does alot more then the ATI because I use the nvidia drivers. I bet buying a nvidia card would make it work.

Since my original post, I’ve managed to get it working. From what I can tell, it’s actually a GLUT problem rather than the ATI drivers.

It appears that GLUT for Linux will reply “IMPOSSIBLE” for any game-mode string, but if you actually call glutEnterGameMode(), it will simply make a full-screen window for you. This works perfectly well, and gives apparently full access to hardware acceleration features.

So, I now have my program working on Linux and MacOS X … and this time Windoze is the one giving me trouble! (Surprise, surprise.) No matter what I feed GLUT for Windows, it always gives me the generic Microsoft software renderer, instead of the Radeon 9700’s hardware acceleration. Needless to say, this both looks and performs like crap.