Ardent Computer Corp of Sunnyvale, California, has opened up its Dore interactive visualisation software to other hardware platforms with a new portable version. Dore, Dynamic Object Rendering Environment, has been available on Ardent’s Tit-an graphics superworkstations since May 1988, but it now claims to have shipped it to around 50 companies with other hardware including the Convex C210, DEC’s VAX-11/750, and workstations from Sun, Apollo and Silicon Graphics. Ardent added a device porting interface to the or-iginal Dore version, so the dynamic and production renderers can drive any graphics hardware in real time. It comes with a porting guide that identifies files and routines that need modification. We provide the templates, and programmers fill in the machinespecific information, it said. The 150,000 lines of C code within Dore include a device driver that runs on a Sun-3 or Sun-4 CXP graphics system under SunView, and this code can be modified for other hosts within two to three days it’s the best candidate on the market for a 3D visualisation standard. It’s $15,000 to com-mercial users, $250 for academics.
