RasMol Classic Site
for RasMol 2.6 (1995-2000)

and its command language used also in Chime and Jmol.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst MA USA

Dedicated to educational uses of RasMol and other free molecular visualization resources. Thanks to Roger Sayle (author of RasMol) for giving RasMol free to the world.
Here's what's NEW at this site,

If you are new to RasMol, we recommend that you start with the Top Five 3D Macromolecular Visualization Technologies. You will find them to be much easier to use and much more powerful: If you are familiar with RasMol, and if you like the command language and scripting, Jmol open-source freeware uses a superset of the same command language, and comes in packages that don't require learning the command language (see above). The Jmol stand-alone application and applet work on Windows/Mac/linux, and have advanced capablities such as loading multiple molecules with independent movement, surfaces and molecular orbitals, cavity visualization, translucency, high-quality rendering ("set antialiasdisplay on"), biological units and crystal symmetry, arbitrary objects such as arrows and planes, true slabbing with slab rotation, and multiple languages.


For those who wish to use RasMol, the current version of RasMol and its reference manual are available elsewhere from RasMol.Org.

Below are links to RasMol Classic resources that were developed in 1995-2000, and have not been updated!.

Most of the tutorials, explanations, introductions, documentation, history, snapshots, exclusive PDB files, and FAQ linked below are not available elsewhere, so they remain available here, despite being somewhat out of date for RasMol versions later than 2.6.

Can't find what you want? Try SEARCHING this site.


Use statistics for the early years of this site, and later years.
This site is the creation of Eric Martz. Send comments to emartz@microbio.umass.edu
Site initiated November 1995. NSF support began February 1997.
Assistance in site updating and improvement by Srinivas Turaga (10/98-5/99).
Name of site changed from RasMol Home Page to RasMol Classic Site, and revisions to this page, July 12, 2008.

Views expressed on this site are those of the author(s) and not of the NSF.