Hate to muddy the waters, but a customer has asked
about getting some basic tools onto NT so that we
can interop better. Hoping someone in this group
may have some insight, I'm including the email. Let
me know if you have any ideas. I'm trying to iron
out a list of what we should do to have a better
PC friendly view of the world, without going to NT.
thanks
-- included text --
The type of NT tools that I would be looking for is as follows:
Our company writes glue to tie many of the entertainment type
applications together. We have translaters, display tools,
programs that scan disk directories and verify that all the
frames of a shot are present, etc. For example, we have a small
program that sircheck (for Solitair Image Recorder Check) that
opens each frame of a shot and reads the header to make sure
that all the frames are of the same resolution. If you have
been doing a shot at video res and rerender at 2k resolution,
It is possible that all of the frames are present, but that
one of them is still the old version. The most common mistake
is to copy frames 1-99 and then 101-199 skipping frame 100.
Customers now have NT workstations -- whether for 3Dstudio,
lightwave, Softimage, or whatever. We are being asked for
the ability to execute sircheck from an NT workstation so that
the files can be verified by the animator before he turns the
tape over to the guy who will be shooting the shot on an SGI
workstation. This utility is part of what makes our film
recorder package more attractive than the competition. Failure
to respond to this kind of request would make our company
appear less responsive in a business that borders on the edge
of custom consultation. We have been exclusively SGI based
since 1984, and have very little NT experience. Most of our
utilities have some kind of GL or OpenGL based GUI. I am
looking for any help to run this kind of program on NT. There
is no high performance graphics involved. Nor do I wish to
redesign the interface to match NT style. I think I can do
some of what I want with the software GL emulator that was
presented for Windows 95. I need some no cost software like
that GL package.
In addition, I need low level stuff like what is in the
developers toolbox. Readers and writers and low level chunks.
For example, we need the ability to read SGI .rgb format files
on NT. The net abounds with utilities for Unix type things on
NT, such as tar. I spoke with the toolbox janitors about
collecting these type of utilities and seeing which ones support
the IRIX versions. For example, finding or adapting a public
domain NT tar package such that it will easily recognize and
handle the default SGI tar block sizes and byte order. Our
customers are artists and animators, not computer programmers.
They need the ability to read tapes, translate files, and in
general, go back and forth between tools and packages without
typing a 60 character command line. They need more than an
NFS mounted partition shared between the SGI and NT. What good
is an NFS mounted partition if you can't read the file format?
The developers toolbox is a wouderful, useful, and esential
effort. It contains much public stuff cleansed for use with
SGI machines. I believe that if the effort is expanded to
include tools for NT that would enable SGI machines to better
fit into a mixed environment, our ability to sell SGI into
these accounts would be greatly enhanced. Right now, I am
under a lot of pressure to port our whole film recorder to
NT. This would be a big project, and one I am not wild about.
If I can not make it easier for SGI's and NT to co-exist, we
will have to give it serious thought.
I hope this answers some of your questions. I see that my
sticky keyboard has played havok with my spelling. I can not
seem to find a decent mail package that can work between my
PC and the SGI mailhost that we have at RFX. Another example
of problems working with NT and SGI. It is agravating not being
able to spellcheck or to edit.
Ray Feeney
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Donna Derby Yobs Silicon Graphics - NSD yobs@engr.sgi.com
Product Marketing http://storm.engr
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