hello there - I''m very new to OpenGL but - I already have a problem : I made a small program which draws a lorenz Attractor to the screen (via lists). because of the size - I have to translate back on Z about 60 units - but when vertices get further away - they start to disappear !!!

Hi, that sounds like Z-Buffer
Try to initialize the viewport with a bit higher zbuffer-far-clip-value (its at glPerspective or something like that, i think)

yep, you set it in the perspective matrix , it tells your graphic cards what is the size of your visible scene (the place between near and far clip plane), this way your graphic card makes the best use of the 16/24bpp z-buffer. You might want to set the near plane to 1.0f and the far plane to 100000.0f or so, depends on your needs. The larger the distance between near and far plane is the less exact z-buffer is and you might encounter some clipping problems with faces being near eachother. Especially with the 16bpp zbuffer, additional 8bits add a lot but some cards simple doesn''t support it.
Hope it helps, good luck!

With best regards,
Mirek Czerwiñski
http://kris.top.pl/~kherin/

yes, yes I even thought it has to do with the Z Buffer.

I found a simpler way : scale everything down by ten. :-)

OK I think that would be stupid (even divisions are way slow - and what I need is speed)

Thanks for your help !