Configuring Quake III Arena for the SGI 1600SW Flat Panel
By Joel 'DeathMongrel' Caesar

More info. on the commands and variables may be found at
http://www.voodooextreme.com/3Fingers/maddog

About and
Requirements

This short document will help you configure your Quake 3 Arena to run on the 1600SW Flat Panel from SGI. Those of you with "cannot initialize fullscreen" this should be the answer to your problem--but this error should only be generated by Q3Test

Requirements (Hardware):
 SGI Visual Workstation 320 or 540
FP Adapter card
1600SW Flat Panel Monitor

Requirements (Software):
 PROM 1.0004 or higher
HAL 1.1 or higher
Cobalt Graphics Drivers 4.1.1 or higher

As long as you meet the above requirement, you should not have problems running Q3Test with a normal CRT. The latest drivers may be downloaded from http://www.sgi.com.
Step 1
Remove Config
 Remove q3config.cfg from your Quake III Arena\baseq3 directory. You need to start with a fresh config, or certain variables will not be updated properly.

Step 2
Make Shortcuts

 Create a shortcut and put it wherever you normally do (common places are the Start Menu and the Desktop). Open up the properties for the shortcut.
Step 3
Edit Shortcuts

Add the following series of commands to the "Target" field, after "quake3.exe":

set r_mode -1 set r_customwidth 1600 set r_customheight 1024 set r_fullscreen 1

If you wish to operate in windowed mode instead, add:

set r_mode 6 set r_fullscreen 0 -- This is for 1024x768
set r_mode 8 set r_fullscreen 0 -- This is for 1280x1024

You can setup a whole bunch of icons, but because of the way the .cfg files are created and read by Quake III Arena, the command variables may be overwritten--this means you need to delete the .cfg file everytime you switch. If you are an avid player, you probably already know about multiple .cfg files, and how to load them, so I will not deal with that here (go find the FAQ or GameSpy).
Step 4
Q3Test Preferences

Now, you need to edit your preferences in Quake III Arena. I highly recommend the following changes from default:

Change Use High Quality Sound to yes

Preferences:

Change all items to enabled and the sky to high-quality.
Change Sync Every Frame to disabled.
Step 5
Dual-Processor
 To enable multi-processing, execute the following from the commandline in quake.

/r_smp 1
/vid_restart

 


Copyright 1999 Joel Caesar

Permission to reprint via any free website is granted,
provided the text is unaltered (the document may be un-HTMLized),
and a link to http://www.digitalos.com is provided.