[biz.dec.workstations] How to get 24-bit pictures on DECstation 5000/200PXG?

merritt@max.u.washington.edu (02/01/91)

	Please reply via Email; in desparation I am posting to groups which
I don't normally read!

Plea:

	I have just gotten a DECstation 5000/200PXG up and [sort of] running,
but have run into a blank wall when it comes to using it for displaying
images (which is after all what I bought it for!).  Can anyone out there
help with the following questions?

Major problem:

- This is a 24 plane display with Z-buffer, but I can't for the life of me find
a demo/example/code_fragment/writeup/whatever that shows me how to get a true
color (24bit) picture up on the screen.  I.e., I want to specify 8 bits of red,
8 bits of green, and 8 bits of blue for each pixel in a window directly (no
color maps). Eventually I will be writing applications code which needs to
display such pictures, but for the moment I'd settle for looking at images I've
created on an IRIS and stored in a binary file (I can dump in a number of
formats, including sun rasterfiles). Surely there's a utility equivalent to
ipaste on the IRIS????? 

- The manual pages for the X11 utilities all speak explicitly of colormaps,
which I do NOT want to use.  The xdpyinfo utility reports that my display has
depth of 24 bits (correct) and lists "visuals" with classes DirectColor and
TrueColor, but even these are listed as having a colormap size of 256. This
doesn't seem right, and anyway none of the X library routines which I can find
in the documentation seem of any help when it comes to describing individual
pixels.  Are these in the X3D-PEX extensions - and if so is there any
documentation anywhere for what and where they are?

- Maybe this has to be done outside of X altogether? But then where do I start?

Less major problems:

- The DEC postscript viewer dxpsview fails on every postscript file I have 
tried with the X error: "BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation) 
			 opcode 53 (X_CreatePixmap)"
I get the same error on other DECstations (5000/200PX) as well.
Is this a bug in the Ultrix 4.1 release?  Is there a work-around (maybe
another more generic X-based postscript viewer)?  


- I was quite taken aback to find that the 19" Sony monitor has two dark
horizontal lines across it (about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way down the screen). I
thought this was a hardware problem, but after a visit from the field service
people I was told "They're all like that. That's what makes the Sony monitors
so good - they use those lines to keep the electron beam precisely in
register"!  Am I the only one in the world to be disturbed by extra lines
across my screen? And what about taking photos from the screen (I can't
afford a separate film recorder) - who wants extra horizontal lines on what's
supposed to be a high-resolution 24-bit color presentation slide?
Anyone have any comments on this - like should I give up on it or try to make
DEC find me a monitor without the extra lines?

					thanks for anything you can offer,
					Ethan A Merritt
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Dept of Biological Structure                H510 Health Sciences
University of Washington SM-20              (206)543-8865
Seattle, WA 98195                           merritt@u.washington.edu
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