How to test 3D program easilier?

When testing other programs (No 3D program), I can use vmware/kvm to test the compatibility easily.
But neither vmware nor kvm supports 3D features. Vmware provides a very limited 3D feature, I cannot run all OGRE demos on it.

So, how do you test program compability on platforms?

Dual boot -- which is a real pain

Andy...

I think "dual" is far to enough...

For Windows, there are Win32 and Win64, 2000, xp, vista, directx 9/10 to be test.

For Linux, there are so many distributions for so many CPUs.

For Mac....

Is there any VM provide 3D features?

Good thing with OGRE is it's friendly with platforms. If you get it to work in Linux on x86 and Windows XP or Vista you should be good. If you are doing an open-source program, you can just ask somebody to try to run your code on Mac. Most of the time, if you have any Mac users, one of them is a programmer (when it comes to free software). If not, and you just really really want to know if it'll work or not, OSx86 would be a rough estimate.

I think you're making this a little more complicated than it really is. 2000, xp, vista, directx9 AND 10? Most of the time, if it runs on XP it'll run on Vista and 2000. OGRE doesn't even use DirectX 10, so I don't know why you even mention that. Unless you're under the impression that Vista runs DX9 through DX10, which it doesn't. Vista has DX10 AND DX9, as DX10 is not backwards compatible.

64 bit would be a "nice thing", but may or may not benefit you much. If you really really want to test 64-bit but don't have a 64 bit processor (and don't have the dough to get one), if you dig you can get one for under $80 (I've seen 64 bit processors under $50 before). Then you can either use XP 64-bit or Vista 64-bit (don't tell anybody how you acquire them ).

The good thing is that modern 64-bit proccesors can run 32-bit code even when using a 64-bit OS (on Linux you can use a chroot jail, Windows does this out of the box, as it installs the x86 and 64-bit libraries and uses the appropriate libraries for your program. Just so long as you don't mix 32-bit and 64-bit code in one program).

edit: You might find this: http://www.virtualbox.org/discussion/1/615 interesting. Try the links on the bottom.

Also, why is this on the python-ogre forum?

Thanks for reply.

Ogre may work perfectly on these platforms.
But I will use many other libraries in this program. I am not very sure all libraries will work on all platforms.
When I tried to test the program, OGRE gave an error in vmware.

According to your advice, I must keep 4 OSes at least: Win32/Win64/Lin32/Lin64 for x86/x64 series CPU.
No other way?

I post this question on python-ogre board because I am using it on this project.
Python is platform-independent. Python-ogre is the same. So I think there should be some people have met the same problem.

Well I think you will need 2 build environments (at a minum) -- Windows XP and Linux, both on x86 platforms.

You should then be able to test the binaries on XP, Vista, Linux on both 32 and 64 bit platforms (yes it would be nice to specifically compile 64 bit versions, however the 32 bit versions should run just fine)

And as it's all opensource you should perhaps rely on others to do the testing on platforms you don't have

Cheers
Andy

Thanks for reply.

Ogre may work perfectly on these platforms.
But I will use many other libraries in this program. I am not very sure all libraries will work on all platforms.
When I tried to test the program, OGRE gave an error in vmware.

According to your advice, I must keep 4 OSes at least: Win32/Win64/Lin32/Lin64 for x86/x64 series CPU.
No other way?

I post this question on python-ogre board because I am using it on this project.
Python is platform-independent. Python-ogre is the same. So I think there should be some people have met the same problem.
According to my advice you'd have 64-bit version of xp or vista and a 64-bit version of linux, if those are available. Otherwise, don't sweat it. 32-bit runs fine on 64-bit OS's as long as they don't link to 64-bit libraries.