March 2003 - Fractdev - mailman.xmission.com

Virtual video test results
by Tim Wegner 10 May '03

10 May '03

Jonathan asked: > Any results? HP-Pavilion with NVIDIA Vanta This works OK with virtual=no, but with virtual=yes, even non-virtual SVGA modes have problems going back to text. Something as simple as SF4 ESC gives a scrambled screen. BTW, it is possible that the virtual feature works, but since it messes up the text screens, I have no way to set it up to try it. I'm inclined to think that the virtual windows parameters should be settable even if the current mode is not a virtual mode. There could be words on the screen to the effect that these parameters only take effect in virtual mode. Dell Optiplex with ATI 3D Rage Pro - virtual screen modes works fine. Sony VAIO laptop with Rage Mobility 1 M AGP - works fine. Old no-name 120 Mhz Pentium with Diamond VIPER V550. Same behavior as HP - OK with virtual=no, scrambled screen otherwise. Summary. ATI video boards are OK, but Nvidia boards have problems. I believe the Diamond viper uses an Nvidia chipset. Since virtual=no works OK, I suggest you release this patch and let our loyal public help tabulate what works and what doesn't. We'll get more feedback that way. Or at least, move the proposed patched version to a public area. Tim

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Time to run source through indent?
by Jonathan Osuch 06 Apr '03

06 Apr '03

Tim, Before I start on anything, how do we want to handle running the source through indent? Jonathan

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Fractint version 20.2 patch 5
by Jonathan Osuch 30 Mar '03

30 Mar '03

Fractint version 20.2 patch 5 diff and executables are now available on the developer's ftp site: www.fractint.org From the Whats new file ***** Patch 5 Made changes to allow Xfractint to find files that use upper case letters. Fixed a problem with the Cellular type that prevented entering an initial row of greater than 32767 from working. Added a message about not being able to resume after interrupting prior to rows being displayed on screen. Fixed an evolver bug which caused setting evolver parameters to turn evolving on, even though evolving was actually turned off. Added Charlie Chernohorsky's truecolor speed up and his implementation of virtual screen sizes for the VESA modes (dotmode=28). This feature does not work consistently between different video cards, so it may be turned off by using the startup command "virtual=n". Use the <V> screen to set the desired virtual screen size. See {View Window}. Please remember that if either X or Y is greater than 2048, solid guessing is turned off. This is for multiple reasons, so it is likely it will NOT get fixed soon. There is also a problem with the colorbars that appear when saving an image leaving bits of corruption on the screen. This occurs in all the VESA truecolor modes. Added Charlie to the scrolling list of contributors. Added Charlie's fix for the l-system type which occurred when a push-pop combination was on two different lines. Fixed the PAGE-UP/PAGE-DN zoombox in Xfractint so that it now appears on the screen. Fixed ranges= in Xfractint so GIFs save correctly and program doesn't end abruptly. ***** What is not mentioned are changes to the Xfractint X11 interface to improve reliability (I hope), man page update, and the Xfractint source now comes as a tar.gz file. All four sources have their own diff in the 2002p05.zip file. You will need to apply only one of them. See the readme.1st file in 2002p05.zip. I have not yet updated the experimental Allegro port source or made a diff for it. Jonathan

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Video image restore
by Jonathan Osuch 24 Mar '03

24 Mar '03

Charlie, Take a look at the latest executable in the experimental directory. When I save a 1200x900 virtual image (starting from 800x600) the restored image comes back okay, but into 640x480. This seems to be different from what it did before. Also, 1600x1200 images try to restore to 1280x1024. Since my screen can't handle this, I am unable to restore them. I seem to recall being able to do this at one time. Would you please take a look at loadfdos.c and see if you can spot what I broke. Thanks. Jonathan

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Patch 5
by Jonathan Osuch 23 Mar '03

23 Mar '03

Tim, The diff and executable in the experimental directory is going to be turned into patch 5. I'll check the float only and xfractint sources to see if there are any additional changes needed. Jonathan

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Re: [Fractdev] List settings
by dmj＠fractalus.com 19 Mar '03

19 Mar '03

Tim, Most list software does seem to "recommend" replies going to the sender and not back to the list. I always thought that was a funny position... it sort of acts to squelch discussion. Sometimes people post replies to the list that they meant to be private (everyone who's done that, please raise your hand) but those usually aren't too serious. The more serious, the less likely the act will be repeated. :) I think the mistakes are worth the improved discussion flow. I think it's much, much better if the e-mail addresses in the archives are not available to harvesters. Big, centralized list servers are attractive targets for harvesters, and we know Xmission's are scanned. I already get spam at a sustained rate of 50-100 per day; while I have taken steps to deal with the torrent, not everyone has the same options I do. For the lists that I manage, I have messages from non-senders sent to me for approval. Every once in a while these messages are spam, but the list software I use filters out messages which aren't To: the list, and that takes care of almost all the spam. If you're getting fifty spams in just a few days, I think it's reasonable to just turn off the forwarding, and have list members contact you if they're having trouble posting. --Damien

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fractdev list mailman software upgraded
by Tim Wegner 15 Mar '03

15 Mar '03

Ok, this mailing list is on the new mailman software 2.1.1 now. For the most part this shouldn't make any difference. There may be some new options on your user list options management web page.

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Re: RE: manpwin source?
by pdeleeuw 15 Mar '03

15 Mar '03

Hi Florian, > Hi Paul! > thanks for your trust in me! ;) Not a problem. Let's work together. > I got a couple of questions: > - Can i rework the code a bit? Are you working on it > or is anyone else? Please feel free to change it any way you like. Just send me the modified files and a short description of the changes and I will merge it into the main product. > - How to you handle multiple developers on the same > code? Right now it's just you and me. There are not a lot of WINDOWS programmers working on fractal code that I know of. > - i've got this crash after selecting a truecolor-file, > that I am trying to fix. Have you had similar problems? My error detection may be a bil lacking. Send me the offending file and I will debug. > - What is the 'roadmap'? I hear fractint is becoming float-only? Yes, FRACTINT is now float only because the PCs are now fast enough to handle the floating point arithmetic. > Is your plan to keep the branch 'manpwin' or do you want to merge > with fractint at some point? I am not sure whether it is easier to keep ManpWIN as a separate stream or to merge it with FRACTINT. After several attempts at merger, I keep getting lost in the user interface. FRACTINT loops are not easy to merge with large WINDOWS loops. I am tempted to compile all the non UI stuff into a library which is easy to maintain by keeping up with the FRACTINT float only code and using ManpWIN to call the library routines. Any comments? By the way, what compiler do you use? All my stuff is built with straight Windows SDK and no MFC for maximum compatibility with FRACTINT and other compilers. I use Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.0. Regards, Paul. ---------------------------------------------------------- Paul de Leeuw Computers Central Coast Australia Email: pdeleeuw(a)deleeuw.com.au www: http://www.deleeuw.com.au ABN 72 360 822 562 ----------------------------------------------------------

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by Betty Trimbo 14 Mar '03

14 Mar '03

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Re: [Fractdev] Re: CVS
by Florian Kolbe 10 Mar '03

10 Mar '03

Hi guys, what's the status on using CVS? I am really afraid that we will branch too much with the allegro branch. Unfortunately I cannot host a CVS server, I only have dialup. Any thoughts? Florian At 19:46 12.11.2002 -0700, you wrote: In article <3DD154D5.2081.8EEDB8@localhost>, Tim Wegner <twegner(a)swbell.net> writes: > CVS is fundamentally file oriented, not patch or release oriented. A patch is just a diff. CVS can produce diffs easily. I'm not sure what you mean by "release oriented". A release is a snapshot of the evolving code base made at a point in time. Tags are used to identify the versions of the files in a release. > A typical patch involves several files. There might even be several > different patches that affect the same file. CVS has no problem generating a patch as a diff between two tags. (A tag is just a symbolic name associated with a particular file revision.) > We could recover > "patchlevel" information using dates. CVS also has a tag feature that > I haven't used. You could use dates, but tags are easier. > CVS doesn't handle renaming files other than by deleting the old and > creating the new (thereby losing the history). When you delete a file in CVS, it isn't permanently deleted. It goes into the "Attic" and can be regenerated when you check out old versions before the file was deleted. The old file has its revision history intact. The new file starts out with a new revision history. Its true that CVS doesn't have a "rename" command that identifies this scenario. In practice, it hasn't been a problem for me on all the projects I've used CVS for revision control. The first checkin of the new file says something like "see old_file.c for revision history before this file was renamed to new_file.c", and then you look at old_file.c's revision history if you really need to see it. In practice, I found that we really didn't rename files that often and even when we did, we didn't need to look at the revision history of the old file. But it is there, if you need to look at it. You just need to understand how CVS operates to see it. If you really feel its important to have the revision history intact then there are ways you can diddle the Repository directly, but they have drawbacks -- basically they break attemps to check out old versions of the code. > CVS handles binary > files poorly (so I have read). CVS handles ibnary files just fine. What it doesn't know how to do is diff a binary file, so it stores a copy of the file every time you check it in, since it doesn't know how to make a diff. In practice, this wasn't a big problem for us. Things like word documents are binary files, and we simply stored the new version of the document. If you want diffs, then you should convert binary files to a text representation before checking in the file. XML is a nice metastandard for representing all kinds of things as text these days. > Subversion is a program that aims to remedy these defects. OK, I looked at their home page. It seems interesting, but I don't know that fractint's needs aren't already served by CVS. My instinct is to stick with tools that I know are stable and work. I'm in no rush to adopt a replacement for CVS unless I have a reason. SVN does have a solution for the file rename problem that looks good, but I didn't see anything on their web site about binary diffs. Since fractint doesn't have any binary files (well, there are some .o files, but you don't actually expect that you'll be sending diffs of .o files, right? You diff the assembly that gneerated the .o and send a new .o), I don't think CVS would be cumbersome for fractint. The place where binary files comes up often is using CVS for web sites that have images. -- Ask me about my upcoming book on Direct3D from Addison-Wesley! Direct3D Book <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> izfree: Open source tools for Windows Installer <http://izfree.sourceforge.net>

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