From TorqueWiki

[edit] Install

[edit] Install at TFH CGA Labor B332

You find the Torque SDK including sources in: Arbeitsplatz->Programme->Torque->SDK

The cd from the book 3D Game Programming All in One: Netzwerk->cga04->torque->3DGP->3D2E

[edit] Problem with older ATI mobile graphic chipsets and newer drivers

[edit] Description

There is a problem with early ATI Mobility Radeon systems (e.g. Mobility Radeon 9200, 64 MB RAM graphics adapter with DirectX 8 hardware support) and new drivers from ATI Catalyst version 6.6 (June 2006) and up. These drivers seem to work well but do not provide full OpenGL functionality for the affected chipsets.

With both the book cd edition and the SDK, every program startup ends in outputting a lot of console errors like

Could not load this GL function: glGenTextures
Could not load this GL function: glBindTexture
Could not load this GL function: glTexImage2D
...

The process needs to be killed by keyboard (the mouse can't be positioned properly). The console.log states

Video Init:
   Accelerated OpenGL display device not detected.
   Accelerated D3D device not detected.
   Voodoo 2 display device not detected.

"OpenGL" display device not found!
"OpenGL" display device not found!
"D3D" display device not found!
"Voodoo2" display device not found!

The official torque demo runs well. DirectX tests run well (dxdiag.exe), OpenGL demo tools too. Only rarely use of graphical games, but no problems has been noted so far.

Unfortunately, the demo can't be easily merged with other versions. A typical error is "demo.exe is already running" although there is no torque-related process, even if it is run as first torque process after system startup.

[edit] Background

Driver releases for Mobility Radeon chipsets prior to 9600 (first DirectX 9 hardware support chipset) have limitiations: The generic driver-suite from ATI ("Catalyst") does not support Mobility Radeon directly (installer says "unsupported chipset"), ATI leaves control over providing up-to-date drivers to the notebook manufacturers.

In my case, drivers for a 2004 manufactored Mobility Radeon 9200 in a Sony notebook were last updated by Sony in 2005, e.g. with no support for recent external widescreen resolutions. Because this is a common problem for many notebook users, it was figured out that the generic Catalyst driver suite is able to support Mobility Radeons, but the installer needs to be patched for accepting the Mobility Radeon chipset signatures.

The torque problem described above appears with Catalyst 6.11 and the current Catalyst 7.5 release (May 2007). In 6.11, the OpenGL driver version (as listed in Catalyst Control Center > Information Center) shows up as "not available", in 7.5 the OpenGL Version is 6.14.10.6590.

[edit] Solution

The Problem can be resolved by installing ATI Catalyst 6.5 (May 2006) or older drivers.