<html><head><title>Molecular modellers compared - Mole and RasMol</title></head>
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<center><h3>Molecular modellers compared - Mole and RasMol</h3></center>
<p>
  There seem to be several of these programs proliferating into the Acorn PD market, so I thought I'd have a look a two which have been said to be the best.
<p>
 The main difference in philosophy between the two programs is that, while Mole was designed as a RISC OS application, RasMol started life on the PC, and was ported (none too brilliantly) over to RISC OS, and so retains much of the style of a PC application.
<p>
  Having loaded some of the example files supplied with each program, I found that, after some twiddling, RasMol has by far the more options for displaying files, though it is also far slower than Mole. RasMol also has the option of using 'scripts' to produce animated molecules, though if your primary purpose is to produce an illustration for a piece of work (this is true in my case), this feature is rather superfluous.
<p>
  Passing on to display quality, RasMol does, eventually, produce some high quality monochrome (and, to a lesser extent, colour) images, but, if you are prepared to wait, Mole will render your molecules rather beautifully.
<p>
<img src="../../images/seretonin"><i>Seretonin - an example of what Mole can produce</i>
<p>
  Creating your own molecule is none to easy in RasMol - I couldn't figure it out even after extensive reading of the manuals (which aren't very comprehensible). However, like all good RISC OS applications, Mole is well-nigh intuitive as far as use is concerned, and any difficulties can easily be resolved by referring to the Help file, which is both brief and to the point.
<p>
  In conclusion, if you are prepared to sacrifice some more advanced features for user friendliness and rendering of molecules, go for Mole (which carries my recommendation). If you are a professional chemist, require a high level of sophistication, and are prepared to figure out how to use a program (no easy task) for the purpose you require with little help from the authors, use RasMol.
<p>
Name: Mole<br>
Author: Simon Kilvington<br>
Status: Freeware<br>
Availability: Most PD libraries and the Datafile's <a href="../Commercial/PDCD5">PD-CD 5</a>.<br>
<p>
Name: RasMol<br>
Author: Roger Sayle<br>
Port: Martin Wurthner<br>
Status: Freeware<br>
Availability: Most PD libraries and the Datafile's <a href="../Commercial/PDCD5">PD-CD 5</a>.
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