The SGI AutoCAD Bonus Pack web page

Home of the software formerly known as the:

AutoCAD Bonus Pack

Including other interesting bits of IRIX software...

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Frequently Asked Questions about SGI and AutoCAD:

* You'll need the Web Installation tools (tardist) to install this software.

GL Driver and Bonus Pack:

The optimized GL display driver for AutoCAD R13_c4 is included on Autodesk's AutoCAD R13 for Unix CD. There is a slight error in the AutoCAD Installation Performance Guide description of the driver installation process. The driver installation image is actually in the directory /opt/acad13/support/gldriver rather than /opt/acad13/drv/gldriver as described. The optimized GL display driver provides several advantages:

Included with the GL display driver are a number of other subsystems that serve to integrate AutoCAD into the Indigo Magic Desktop:

Download and install the latest version (3.44) of the GL Driver and Bonus Pack here. (1.4 Mb) *

* You'll need the Web Installation tools (tardist) to install this software.
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How was AutoCAD ported to the IRIX operating system?

This was a somewhat long story. Early on, in the IrisVision days (still Micro-Channel), my manager and I went up to visit Autodesk at their Sausalito, CA. building. We ran the various 3D GL demos and talked about the specifications and performance. Toward the end, I ran a demo of a 2D CAD drawing that extruded into a 3D house (I think the demo was named house) and all of a sudden a few of the AUtodesk engineers from the "ports" group perked up. As we were packing up, one of them (Nathan) pulled me and my manager into his office and said look at this. He fired up AutoCAD R12 on a Personal Iris workstation. It was running with the native X11 display driver, but it was fully functional. At the time, the "ports" group was in charge of porting AutoCAD to other platforms besides MS-DOS, like Sun, HP and DEC.

At that time, I was working on a GL display driver for the IrisVision card on DOS, which we also showed them. They were rather ho-hum on that, saying that we needed to get the PC-AT version out, which we were close to doing. However, we got a copy of the IRIX-R12 code from Autodesk along with the Unix ADI-driver sample code. I was tasked with porting the DOS Iris-GL display driver to Irix. That was very complicated, as under Unix, the display driver also has to handle all the window manager interactions (expose, resize, icon-ify, etc.) as well as keyboard and mouse input. In the DOS world, that's all handled by the AutoCAD application itself. Anyway, I think Autodesk eneded up releasing their R12 IRIS port on the all-in-one Unix AutoCAD R12 CD.

Later, when AutoCAD R13 came out, there was some discussion of having SGI (i.e. me) handle the port to IRIX. I had an office up in Sausalito, later San Rafael, CA. that I would drive up to every day. I think we had a few Insdigo workstations as well as a Challenge L in the lab. That had 4 x R4400 - 200MHz CPUs with 2GB of ram and a handful of 4GB SCSI drives. Using the IRIX parallel make (pmake) utility, I could rebuild the entire AutoCAD source in maybe 20-30 minutes. Also, with the, at the time, huge memory, I could also run a full -DEBUG build of AutoCAD in the IRIX debugger. This was something that the Autodesk ports engineers said was impossible!

We later had a couple of temps working on the port, one guy who handled running my builds against the extensive AutoCAD internal test suites. Then we had another guy, Bill, who was a database expert, handle all the database integration testing with AutoCAD. That involved setting up three different database servers, getting those connected to AutoCAD and then running all those tests. Those two guys really were helpful in testing all those areas, allowing me to focus on finding and fixing the bugs they uncovered.

We did this for both the R13c3 and c4 releases. In the end, I was able to greatly speed up the performance of AutoCAD. One massive speedup was with the Autodesk Modelling Extension (AME) startup. The way that was originally added into AutoCAD, their engineers simply linked in the entire AME library into AutoCAD. That is a huge library and since it was statically linked, all that code had to be read in off the disk, loaded into memory and then all the initialization calls had to be run. I ran into some issues with that in the port and digging into it a bit, I saw that the code was structured such that there was the top layer code, then an intermediate layer that had the main entry points to the various sections of the AME library and finally the bottom layer of code where all the 3D stuff happened. Simple fix was to split those intermediate layers off into separate libraries and then link those into the code. That way, the application could take advantage of the new IRIX dynamic shared objects (.so files, similar to .dll in Windows). With dso's, a place holder for the code is created, but unless something in that shared object library is called, none of the code there actually runs or even occupies memory. That one fix, cut the startup time in half.

Another improvement I made was in the licensing. As coded by AUtodesk, they had ticked on every possible option in the Elan License Manager code (elmd). I think they had host name, IP address and sysid (MAC address) selected. I changed the IRIX version to only work off of sysid, which is unique to each system. The problem with adding the first two is for systems on DHCP networks, they may get a new IP and/or host name each time they boot up. That would then cause the license manage to fail to issue a license!

In the end, I think there were two major things that doomed AutoCAD on IRIX. The biggest one was that it was included on the Unix CD, along with Sun, HP, and DEC. However, when Autodesk sold a Unix copy, the saleman would usually mark that down as the Sun version, unless it was specifically purchased for SGI. Related to that was the trade-in program Autodesk ran. Anyone could trade in any old copy of AutoCAD on the latest version for something like $500. We knew of many instances of dusty old DOS copies being traded in to get the Unix version to run on the SGI workstations and servers at customer sites. Those upgrade sales were not tracked as far as what platform they were for. As such, Autodesk would look and see that the SGI version wasn't very popular per their records, yet we knew it was being used quite extensively. But the bigger picture was that Autodesk decided to go 100% with Windows and drop all the other platforms. In their early days, their big claim to fame was AutoCAD could be run on almost anything. We did work with them on the Inventor application, but then when Microsoft picked up the OpenGL and Inventor components, I think that fell by the wayside as well.

In all, I logged over 30,000 miles of driving to/from Marin county over a few years. It was a 65 mile trip each way.

AutoCAD on XFS File Systems:

While AutoCAD itself runs very well on the new XFS file system, you may run into some difficulty when trying to install AutoCAD on large file systems, especially ones over 2 GB in size. Since the installation program is a 32-bit executable, it sees numbers over 2 GB (2^31) as negative, and thus improperly determines that there is insufficient disk space to complete the installation. There is an easy work-around for this problem in the 'ainstall' program:

ainstall work-around:

Instead of using the selection:

use the selection:

and then de-select one option in the Custom Install dialog box. For example, if you don't require the External Database Access (ASE) feature, click on the option button to its left to remove it from the installation list and select OK.

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AutoCAD License Server:

Autodesk uses the Elan License Manager (ELM) for all Unix platforms. ELM is a network licensing system that provides floating AutoCAD licenses. It is based on a client-server architecture, in which one (or more) license servers (running the ELM license daemon; ad_elmd) respond to license requests from one (or more) clients via a list specified by the ACADSERVER environment variable. Even in the trivial case of a single workstation, a license server and client process (AutoCAD in this case) are needed. Also, you should note that the ELM licenses work transparently across all the supported Unix platforms.

Here is an installable package to simplify the process of installing and configuring the R13 license server*. With the click of the mouse button, you'll install the license daemon, create all needed directories, network startup scripts, and even run the license administration program to generate your server ID to send you your dealer. It even creates a chkconfig flag for ad_elmd to allow you to easily turn the license daemon on and off easily.

Did you know that the R13 license server can be used with AutoCAD R12? You'll need to do two things to get this to work.

* You'll need the Web Installation tools (tardist) to install this software.

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Collaborative Engineering:

One of the primary benefits of AutoCAD on SGI is the ability to integrate the efforts of multiple people on a project with a variety of collaborative tools. This collaboration is available in many forms and you may find you'll need more than one technique depending on your situation at hand. These collaboration techniques range from live multi-user shared application sessions (X/TeleScreen) to live audio/video teleconferencing (InPerson) to store-and-forward drawing markup (Annotator) to the latest Web-based paradigm (OutBox and VRML) and that old standby; facsimile.

Below I'll relate my experiences with each of these technologies:

National Information Systems has a product called X/TeleScreen that allows you to share any X Window application, including AutoCAD. This allows you to have a true multi-user shared AutoCAD session.

Here's how I set up xtls to work with AutoCAD:

Set up the XTLSDIR environment variable and run the xtls program;

Due to it lower bandwidth requirements I recommend that you use the X/Motif display driver with XTLS. The GL driver will work between two (or more) SGI workstations, but unless you have a good network connection, you may find it to be slower in interactive operations, such as dragging, etc. I would recommend at least a single B-channel ISDN network connection for XTLS.

I have even tried a shared session to a PC running Windows and the Hummingbird eXceed/W X Window server.

Be sure to set up the eXceed server to provide backing store when requested.

If you are working with 3D AutoCAD models, you may also want to look into SGI's Annotator and InPerson products. Both are available from the SGI_TOOLS menu in AutoCAD under the Collaboration sub-menu.

Finally, you could also look into using the Mind Share OutBox web server that comes on all SGI systems. By exporting a VRML model from AutoCAD and placing it in your ~/public_html directory, your model is available for review over the Web.

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Print To Fax:

The SGI Tools menu includes a FAX item under the Collaboration section. This feature requires a few separate software packages. First, you'll nee the PostScript Utilities and the HylaFAX telecommunications software (below). In addition, you'll need to have the Practical Extraction and Report Language (PERL) installed. On IRIX 5.x, this is an optional package that should be included on your IRIX execution CD. In IRIX 6.x, PERL is installed by default.

Here's a screen shot of the Print-to-FAX feature in operation.

* You'll need the Web Installation tools (tardist) to install this software.
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Third Party Solutions:

A number of interesting third-party applications exist for AutoCAD on SGI. Here's some that I know about:

If you run across any other interesting apps, please let me know via e-mail.
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CAD Resources:

If you run across any other interesting resources, please let me know via e-mail.
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[Last updated: 11.September.2025 ]

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