Mesa GL driver on windows

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Is there a way to use the Mesa OpenGL driver on windows when there is also a hardware driver present?

My company is currently using JOGL and Xith3D to display a 3D preview of utility poles. On recent hardware and drivers, it works flawlessly, but much of our target audience is on Intel Integrated graphics cards, and used by people who do not understand how to update their drivers. Their older drivers have several bugs that specifically prevent JOGL from functioning.

Just enabling the jogl.gljpanel.nohw option does not seem to work - the opengl context returns only 1.1 support, and still causes the rendering to fail (unfortunately, I have not been able to find exactly where in the xith engine it does fail).

We would like to include the mesa opengl drivers with our application and provide a way to draw with them instead if the hardware driver is not working. However, I can’t seem to get my app to load the mesa drivers while there is another driver present. Does anyone know how I would go about doing this, or if there a some other way to get software rendering working in jogl?

Thanks.

-Michael Ford

#2

This would be done outside of Java, before the user runs it. But what if you tried building an installer or installation script (i.e. in VBScript) that will check the drivers for you and install the Mesa drivers as required.

#3

So if I am hearing this right, it is not possible to have two different versions of the openGL driver available on the system, and to switch between them? I would have to remove their existing GL driver during install?

Is there any other way to get functional software rendering through jogl as a fallback? I’m not doing anything particularly modern - just vertex arrays and basic texturing, but apparently it is not working when I pass in the jogl.gljpanel.nohw option.