Problems with Celestia v.1.2.5 alpha 2 for MacOS X. I am running 10.2.3 on a Dual-processor 1GHz G4 with ATI Radeon 9000 64MB graphics (stock card).
1) The original alpha release drew Amalthea, Tethys, Phobos, and Deimos without any problems (e.g., I looked at Amalthea with that version, and it was a nice, reddish, asteroidish blob, Phobos showed the correct image map, etc.). Now, they appear entirely black, regardless of illumination or resolution. The image maps are there in the directory, but they do not display. I could not figure out what the common denominator was for these particular bodies. I have not exhaustively checked the other bodies, but most others appear to be fine.
2) As reported by others, relatively large texture maps (for me, it was a 4096x2048 PNG image of the Earth) crash or hang the program, and take the system with it. This was true of the original alpha version of Celestia and the current a2 one. I took the opportunity to upgrade the system between 10.2.1 and 10.2.3 to see if the OpenGL changes would make a difference. It did make a slight, almost irrelevant difference: with 10.2.1, the screen blanked to black and I had to reset. With 10.2.3, the screen froze, but the mouse kept working, and I had to reset. Like I said, the difference was slight
Maybe I could have logged in remotely and killed processes to recover, but I have not checked. Judging by the system-level problems, I am guessing it is some driver/OpenGL/OS problem being tickled by the larger bitmaps, as other people have suggested in the forum. This also shows up in the system log repeatedly, and may be a clue:
Feb 12 14:17:00 Pandora mach_kernel: ATIRadeon::submit_buffer: Overflowed block
waiting for FIFO space. Have 3, need 6. RBBM_STATUS 0x80010140
Feb 12 14:17:01 Pandora mach_kernel: ATIRadeon::submit_buffer: Overflowed block
waiting for FIFO space. Have 3, need 6. RBBM_STATUS 0x80010140
As alpha software, the program works great. It works well for most things, such as the stock data files. I get what I deserve for getting greedy and trying huge bitmaps.
Thanks greatly for porting the program. You have done a wonderful job.