Re: [Mesa3d-users] New user, with NVIDIA Gforce

[<k.w...@at...>]

> I confess, I'm a complete newbie here...
> 
> I am taking a course in Graphics programming, and our labs our outfitted 
> with Mesa3d on Redhat 7.something. Our lab computers are, however, old, 
> clunky, and in high demand. My home computer is newer, less clunky, and 
> only I get to use it, so I decided to try to install the Mesa libraries 
> here so I could actually do some work outside of lab-time...
> 
> Unfortunately I'm getting more confused by the minute.
> 
> I'm running WindowsXP pro and I have both MSVC 6.0 and also the Cygwin 
> dev environment from the Redhat people.
> 
> Unfortunately I have an NVIDIA graphics card (GForce256).
> 
> I've had a look around the Mesa3d website, and I found the note about 
> needing the NVIDIA OpenGL libraries, so I scooted over to the NVIDIA 
> site, and promptly discovered that I can't find anything except my 
> graphics drivers on it.
> 
> If someone out there can give me a few hints on setting up my dev 
> environment at home I would be endlessly greatful. I have a lab due 
> tomorrow, my menus aren't working yet, and it's cold out.
> I don't want to go to school today ;)

I think that you have at least 2 choices:

1) Since you have MSVC, you also have the ability to build OpenGL applications
without needing Mesa.  What I would suggest is finding a nice sample program
that does all the basic Win32/MFC stuff so you don't have to reinvent it and
then concentrate on the GL parts to get your work done.  There may be some
samples in the MSDN stuff you may or may not have installed, or look on the
web.  There are some tutorials by "NeHe" that may be worth looking at.  You
also should not need to worry about and nVidia libraries unless you just
want to update your drivers on the PC (which you say you have already).
Perhaps the note you saw had more to do with getting the drivers for Linux.

2) There are some reasonable samples/demos in the Mesa distribution.  You
can unzip both the MesaLib and MesaDemo zip files and build with MSVC.  This
will also build the demos.  A program like demos/gears should run just fine
after you build the tree.  (Read the notes in the doc dir)  You can then find
the demo program that is closest to what you want to do and modify it to get
your work done.  You can rebuild it just like the other demos, leveraging
the current makefiles.  These demos don't use menus or other GUI items.  If
you need an interactive menu-driven program, the first option might be better.