From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 01 2023 - 13:33:52 CST

Hi,
  The old VMD 1.9.1 binaries should indeed load PDB files, however
the linkage to the on-the-fly web download won't work anymore because
the PDB archive has been restructured and the old URL paths that were
compiled into the program are no longer accessible.
Try downloading your structure(s) locally and load them that way.

Can you tell us more about your 3DSystems Touch setup?
We haven't had one of these running for many years now, so it hasn't
been possible for us to test any of that functionality for a long
time, although all of the code still exists in the current versions
of VMD.

Best,
  John Stone

On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 10:23:23AM +0100, Trollmann, Marius wrote:
> Dear VMD-Community,
>
> Based on some older threads about this topic, I installed VMD 1.9.1
> on my machine and prepared the vmdsensors file as suggested in the
> online documentation:
>
> device phantomtracker vrpntracker://localhost/Phantom
> scale 10
> rot left 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0
> device phantombuttons vrpnbuttons://localhost/Phantom
> device phantomfeedback vrpnfeedback://localhost/Phantom
>
> Finally,I put this file into the VMD home directory ("C:\Program
> Files (x86)\University of Illinois\VMD\.vmdsensors").
>
> That worked! VMD was able to detect the VRPN server in the Tool
> window and I could interact with a MD simulation (e.g. Poly-alanin
> from the IMD tutorial).
> However, I still observe a minor drawback: The pre-compiled version
> of VMD 1.9.1 for Windows has not the option to read/load PDB files.
> Is it possible to re-install a plugin or something to achieve this?
> Moreover, I would like to ask why more recent versions of VMD were
> not able to detect the VRPN server? Are they not compiled with VRPN?
> If so, is there a possibility to obtain such a compilation from the
> developer team or the community?
>
> At least, I hope this thread can help other people with the same
> device and the same problems. I would also like to thank all the
> developers for this very cool open source project!
>
> All the best,
> Marius

-- 
Research Affiliate, NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Visualization
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/