Folks,

I'm looking for a couple of truly fearless alpha testers who are not afraid
to crash their Windows machine if need be. What's up? I've got an early
version of the 3D hardware acceleration going but I couldn't test it on a
lot of graphics hardware. You can help! Here's how:

Downloading & Installation
--------------------------
Get yourself a copy of the zip file from

http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~raab/squeak/alpha/Squeak3DTest.zip

IMPORTANT: Extract these files into a special directory so you can throw
away everything after you're done. The files are *exclusively* for testing
this stuff, there's nothing you should keep around for daily work.

If you have more than one machine with different graphics cards or are
running different Windows versions, I'd appreciate a test on all of them.
The more information I can get the better for all of you.

Running
-------
Run the VM+Image contained in the package. Once the image comes up, you'll
see two projects. One is a 3D world and the other one a blit test. Try to
enter either one of those projects.

WARNING---WARNING---WARNING: At this very point your machine might crash.
The hard way. I don't expect it but it's quite possible.

If the acceleration works as expected you should get some pretty neat frame
rates in each project. The blitter should run at >= 200 fps (on my machine
~400fps) and the 3D project at >= 30fps (on my machine ~45fps). If you can
enter the project and the frame rate is below 100fps for the blitter and/or
10fps for the 3D world your hardware is probably not accelerated.

If you get errors when entering either one project, ignore those and try the
other project. The errors are unlikely to be helpful in any way (the
important information is stored elsewhere -- see below).

You can expect that the HW acceleration works if you've got a Direct3D
accelerated card with enough VRAM. If you don't get an acceleration although
you're pretty sure that your graphics card can accelerate 3D then try to
change the display settings. Only 16 and 32 bit depths are currently
supported (no 8 or 24 bpp!). Reducing the display resolution will help with
the available VRAM so that's another thing you can try.

Note that Squeak might look a bit weird when the acceleration is running. In
particular colors can look wrong. Don't worry if that happens - I haven't
yet done a lot of support for different RGBA orders, mostly because my
machine's RGBA order is identical to Squeak's and so it's a bit hard to
test. Feedback is needed.

Feedback
--------
Feedback is important! Once you've tried to enter any of the two projects
you'll find a log file in the directory where you put all those files. This
'Squeak3D.log' file is the most valuable information I can get. It will show
your hardware configuration as well as any errors encountered during
rendering.

IMPORTANT: Please send me this log! Privately. Not to the list please.

The information in Squeak3D.log will help me to fix the remaining problems
with all this stuff. Please include a brief note on the Windows version
you're running (e.g., 95/98/2K/NT plus service packs if appropriate). Also,
please include an *exact* description of the graphics hardware you're using.
The easiest way to get this description is to
- Right click on 'My Computer' on the desktop
- Choose 'properties' to view the system properties
- In the system properties dialog select the 'Device Manager' tab
- The list in the device manager should include 'Display adaptors'
- The name(s) appearing in this list is what I'm interested in.

Thanks for your help,
  - Andreas