Eureka ! X on the MAC

In the early days of the PC, the definition of a good "compatible" PC
was one which could run the flight simulator.

Now the VMS flight simulator won't run on modern alphas with modern
graphics card unless you reconfigure and reboot into 256 colour mode.
Not exactly "compatible".

Low and behold comes the Macintosh which is more compatible than an alpha !

Yes sirs and mississes , you heard it here ! I finally, after over a
year of abstinence, got flight to run, but this time, it ran on the MAC
display !!!!!

Still not quite made final and permanent:

bash$ defaults write com.apple.X11 nolisten_tcp -boolean false
bash$ defaults write com.apple.X11 no_auth -boolean true
bash$ xhost +bike.vixenation.ca
bash$ xhost +chain.vixenation.ca

(Not sure how "sticky" those setting are across reboots etc).
(By default MACs are configured to not allow incoming X connections)


Then, in the X application, you go into preferences, go to the OUTPUT
section, and in the Colour, select 256 (to run flight). Exit and restart X.

Then, from the VMS host, use standard SET DISP/CREATE and run the
flt$simulator

So, to display FLIGHT on a MAC, you don't need to reboot and it doesn't
kill all your other running apps (which can still be in millions of
colours).

Another thing I forgot to mention:

To get raw X windows into the MAC, you also need to go into the
System Preferences , Internet & Network , Sharing

Click on the "Firewall" tab and then you need to create another entry
for X-Windows, allowing ports 6000-6100 onto the mac.


With Tiger, I haven't yet found how the firewall can restrict inbound
calls to certain IP ranges or exclude IP ranges. (I suspect this may
have to be done at the unix level). This is an area where VMS is better
documented.

In article <7f2dd$4758c118$cef8887a$17762@TEKSAVVY.COM>, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> writes:[color=blue]
>
> Now the VMS flight simulator won't run on modern alphas with modern
> graphics card unless you reconfigure and reboot into 256 colour mode.
> Not exactly "compatible".
>
> Low and behold comes the Macintosh which is more compatible than an alpha !
>
> Yes sirs and mississes , you heard it here ! I finally, after over a
> year of abstinence, got flight to run, but this time, it ran on the MAC
> display !!!!!
>[/color]

Of course, you could just run a modern flight simulator on your Mac. :-)

Have a look at [url]http://www.flightgear.org/[/url] if you are interested.

Disclaimer: I do all my simulator work on Linux, and I've never used OS X
so I don't know if there are any Mac specific issues.

Note that you will need a hardware accelerated graphics card.

Simon.

--
Simon Clubley, [email]clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP[/email]
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980's technology to a 21st century world

Simon Clubley wrote:[color=blue]
> Of course, you could just run a modern flight simulator on your Mac. :-)[/color]

Not the same as the venerable "flight" on VMS. (Besides, I had created
a world for montreal, complete with the airport buildings and
mont-royals as well as place ville-marie (had written a DXF to .world
source file app, and I'll have to redo it now :-( ;-(

I had also created a souped up version of the Concorde with enough
Ummmph to reach escape velocity ! (had to be extremely careful below 50k
feet altitude because aircraft would breakup if going too fast).


[color=blue]
> Have a look at [url]http://www.flightgear.org/[/url] if you are interested.[/color]

It is downloading as I type this.

I've found OS-X to have pretty good multi tasking scheduling. The other
day, I was listining to itunes radio (real time processing), while
converting a CD to MP3 and running an old Sound-Edit application to
record the music being produced by Itunes and it all worked without
missing a beat.