dugger

Hey all,

First, thanks for this wealth of knowledge and resource. What a great place to find!

I have an older Lenovo Thinkpad A30 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500. I am trying to use vasFMC (a home cockpit flight sim tool) which seems to require openGL 2.1 or greater. Even with the modded driver from here (I installed the latest xp-32 driver and used the most recent version of the mod tool) I can only get openGL1.3 working and openGL1.4 partial. I noticed a couple of entries about modifying the reg key for the drivers and I have done that (ATI Mobility Modder Version 1.2.1.0 Released) though I only have the ati2dvag in my drivers reg.

It seems that some people have had luck getting other programs requiring openGL to work using this tool. I don't know what version is required, but judging by the dates on the posts I am assuming later than 1.3.

So the skinny of it is whether or not it is possible to get 2.1 running on this video card. I've found in other linux forums that people have been successful. And while I have an ubuntu partiion, I would prefer to stay in xp.

Any help? Thanks.

Judas

While i understand your position and issues... i unfortunately do not have really much experience or know how to really assist you..

A mobility 7500 isn't exactly modern by any means..... and getting drivers for it with better support then what the latest WORKING driver provided by AMD shows..... i don't think your going to have much luck without talking to those that have been successful under the windows XP enviroment .. (considering that for vista and win7.... there aren't even supported drivers for anything below the 9250 series at all...)

You may end up getting stuck with linux in the end.... i'm not sure.... it may save you time and headaches to try and find a more modern laptop with the required support... then to pull your hair out trying to make your excisting one work..

In the end you'll decide.... or perhaps someone here will be able to further assist you..

good luck.

__________________

dugger

Thanks Judas,

Yeah, that's basically my sense of it as well. This was a "last ditch" effort to see if anyone smarter or more computer-literate than I had been successful in getting more out of the card than it was built for. In its day it was a screamer of a card. It is still a pretty decent machine (1.6gHz proc, 1GB ram). The weakest link is the video card. Silly thing is that I'm not trying to render anything fancy, just text. But the designers put it in a GL format that is beyond my card's capabilities.

But in linux I've seen people pull it off with this card. So the question remains, why can't it happen in an XP environment.

Anyone out there make this work? Somebody's gotta be like me trying to milk the hardware they have for everything (even more than) its got!

shaman9876

According to Radeon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the 7500 is only capable of Opengl 1.3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#OpenGL_1.3 You need a R9500 or newer to get Opengl 2.0 or better. It is a hardware restriction not a software restriction. Just like DirectX which your card only supports DirectX 8. Does not mean you cannot install the newer versions, but it does mean it will only support up to 1.3 API calls for OpenGL and API calls up to DirectX 8.

Sorry, but I hope this helps.