January 2002 - Fractdev - mailman.xmission.com

CVS
by robin.b2＠ukonline.co.uk 16 Jun '02

16 Jun '02

Hi Tim, I'll have a go at hosting CVS if you like, I've yet to determine what my cable connection is like for such things so I'll stick a recent patch of xfractint in and set you and Jon up with accounts on my cygwin setup so you can use ssh to access the repository. I've also written up some quick howto's for the other UTron project coders so I'll post them as well. Probably get it done over the weekend, watch this space :-) >On another subject, what is the problem re Fractint and XP? Probably the same as with NT and win2K, they all use a HAL type setup so direct hardware access is out. Though 2K and XP can both use directx. I wonder if any windows whizz out there could do a directx wrapper in fractint for video and keyboard access, that'd be cool :-) Cheers, Robin. ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through UK Online webmail

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Future C/assembly problems
by Jonathan Osuch 28 Jan '02

28 Jan '02

Tim, The port over to djgpp is going to cause the assembly routines to die. As I understand it, under djgpp the gcc compiler uses the underscore in front of variable names. Under Linux/Unix, the gcc compiler does not use the underscore. I am having to change hard coded variable sizes from the 16-bit values to 32-bit values. This will obviously cause problems when the 64-bit compilers come along. I'll work on making this easier with equates. Any thoughts or suggestions? Jonathan

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Progress however slight
by Jonathan Osuch 20 Jan '02

20 Jan '02

Tim, There is still a ways to go to finish running Xfractint through -Wall. I'm about half way. I've decided to back out the indent changes. Most of them, anyway. There are one or two files that will have the changes because I don't feel like recreating the changes in an unindented version. The parsera.asm port assembles and links, and then bombs with the obligatory segmentation fault when it is run. And, of course, the C version is also broken by the modifications to get the assembly version incorporated. Which sounds grim, but isn't. I just need to carefully look through the code. I spent this weekend getting the new external DSL modem working. First I needed to get it to talk to Windows so I could update the bios. That took almost 4 hours. Then I had to get the new router to talk to the modem. Then get the modem to talk to the ISP. Setting up the other computers was a breeze after that. That was all in Windows. Getting it to work in Linux was easy by comparison, but still took too long. I managed to get the networked printers to work under Linux thanks to cups/Kups. Although, again, it wasn't straight forward. So now I normally boot into Linux. There is still dosemu to figure out, and possibly wine. At least now I can do all my work on the laptop and not have to worry about transfering files to the desktop to keep them synchronized. Not that I was doing that on a regular basis anymore anyway. Jonathan

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Formula parser assembly code and Xfractint
by Jonathan Osuch 14 Jan '02

14 Jan '02

Tim, I finished going through the formula parser assembly code and it now assembles without error using NASM. I'll start the integration with Xfractint later this week. Jonathan

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Wishlist editorship
by Morgan L. Owens 13 Jan '02

13 Jan '02

After a couple of weeks tinkering (and I'm sure I found a Mozilla Composer bug somewhere), starting, restarting, changing my mind and starting again, I've finished going through Robin Bussell's Fractint Wish List - pruning out the deadwood so to speak. I'm sending the edited files to Robin, but I thought I'd summarise what I found here. Best way to do it is to reproduce the editorial I've put on the page and check with you lot in case there are any grievous errors that need to be changed in it. Morgan L. Owens "Well, it looked easy from here..." -----------8<---------------------------- Note added by the guest Editor, 2002-01-10. Some pruning has been done to this list - a number of wishes have been deleted and/or shortened for a number of reasons. Reasons include: * Wishes for things that have since been added to Fractint - often after being asked for on this list; * Wishes for things that were in Fractint all along; * Wishes for things that fall too far outside Fractint's terms of reference; * Bug reports. These now have their own page; * Things that have been asked for several umptillion times already that require a complete ground-up rewrite of the entire Fractint system, which today carries far too much legacy architecture and code from the days when the 80386 was worth its surface area in farmland. These points are already in hand in one way or another (and if they're not I agree they should be): * Truecolour/PNG support (JPEG is not a good format for the types of images Fractint produces) * A Windows CE/NT/ME/XP/FU implementation * A Macintosh implementation * Un*x support (this may become the default development platform, I hear) * Voodoo/Matrox/Whatever video card support * Randomness There are plenty of requests already in the lists for certain things. These are still in the list because (AFAIK) there is as yet no work being done on them, mainly through lack of various resources (time, manpower, talent) and current focus on other tasks. I've put them here, where they're easier to spot, to serve as a subtle hint of Fractint's Most Wanted: * Music - generation and/or synchronisation; * Built-in animation (as opposed to additional utility programs) - zooms and parameter manipulation, both offline movie generation and realtime (plug Fractint straight into your local nightclub's video wall!); * Screensavers, various plugins (WinAMP, Photoshop, etc.); * Multiprocessing - both exploiting multiple processors in one machine, or farming tasks out to a machine farm; * An internal formula/IFS/L-system text editor; One more thing, but probably the most important thing of all. Fractint is written (and is being written) by volunteers, who do it because they have fun doing so. They don't get paid for it, they don't want to get paid for it, and they don't want you to have to pay for it. But they all still have to put food on the table, so they work on it when they can in between w*rk. If you're a programmer (Fractint is written in C, and there're no plans to change this) who wants to contribute to its development, don't just say "I wish I could contribute", contribute!. That's how all the existing Stone Soup Group programmers got started, and it's why the credits list is so long. Download the current developers' sources from www.fractint.org and get hacking! You can subscribe to the Fractint Developers' list in much the same way as the Fractint list itself: send a blank email to fractdev- request(a)mailman.xmission.com with subscribe as the subject. I'll just reiterate one disclaimer. This is not the official Fractint site. It is not part of Noel Giffin's Fractint User site, nor is it part of Tim Wegner's Fractint Developer site. It is developer Robin Bussell's contribution of a place where Fractint's users can suggest ways to make it even better, and where he and the other developers can check in from time to time to see what you-all reckon needs doing. (Don't you wish English had a proper second-person plural form?) Don't make it an unpleasant chore for them :-) We now return you to the Fractint Wish List. - the Editor

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engines and components
by Rich 07 Jan '02

07 Jan '02

OK, its been said many times before that fractint source would be better organized as a portable engine and some sort of platform specific front-end. I'd like to go further and suggest exposing the engine as a COM object with no GUI and an ActiveX control wrapper around the engine that provided an easy "fractint in a web page" setup. I don't know how familiar the rest of you are with COM and ActiveX controls. Over the past two years I learned all about how to make such beasts. Currently I'm finishing my D3D book, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on that, and I'd like to do something fractint-ish afterwards. Comments? -- Ask me about my upcoming book on Direct3D from Addison-Wesley! Direct3D Book <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Don't Support Spammers! Boycott Fractal Painter 7! <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/spammers.html>

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Re: [Fractdev] Xfractint compiler optimizations
by Jonathan Osuch 07 Jan '02

07 Jan '02

Tim, > I have looked into using indent. It's fine for new development or > situations when you are willing to redo all the comments. It's bad > for legacy code created by many people, because almost invariably > careful formatting of comments gets messed up. Currently, the default style of indent is the GNU style. I used it on video.c and the comments were virtually untouched. I like the results. As expected, the file size increased (from 16216 bytes to 17049 bytes). Don't try this at home, I have already modified the file to clear up the -Wall warnings. Unfortunately, the object file size also increased (from 49984 bytes to 50080 bytes). Not much, but I'm a little uneasy about it. I looked at the before and after C files and couldn't see any obvious reason for the different object file sizes. Jonathan

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Re: [Fractdev] Parser sqrt and asin functions
by Jonathan Osuch 06 Jan '02

06 Jan '02

Tim, > Help, I don't see it, I wonder why. The top few messages are: Look at the wish list, not the bug list. Jonathan

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Parser sqrt and asin functions
by Jonathan Osuch 06 Jan '02

06 Jan '02

Tim, A comment has been made on the Fractint wish list that the formula parsers sqrt and asin functions don't seem to work properly. Do you recall how we tested these functions? Jonathan

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List of subscribers
by Jonathan Osuch 06 Jan '02

06 Jan '02

Tim, Is it still possible to get a list of subscribers to the Fractint and Fractdev mailing lists? And, if it is, how is it done? Jonathan

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