JoTz,
I have tested your e^89 par, and it does exactly as you say. It locks
up on a single pixel for hours. I think Jonathan and Tim should look at
this. I'll email them my current image so that they don't have to start
it over.
Lee
------------------------------- Original Message ---------------------
Lee say:
"I think I can explain. I don't believe that there is such an arbitrary
precision bug in later versions of Fractint. In your deepest zoom at a
magnification of e^89, and using a maxiter of over 2 billion, the image
does "freeze" once the showdot reaches the edge of the minibrot. But,
unless you had a very powerful machine (much faster than your P3-733),
it would be expected to take a very long time per pixel, and thus appear
to freeze up."
No. That is the first thing I thought of. But if that was it ALL
versions of fractint would show the same behavior. They do not. It does
take longer to get through the lake area, but if you hit TAB a couple
minutes apart, you will see different number for row/column etc. showing
it is still working, albeit slowly. When I say it freezes I mean it
locks up on one pixel and doesn't proceed any further - same row/column
for hours.
No problem with the E+55 minibrot (the second one) in the video, but on
the final E+89 brot, shortly after the tiny black spot in the center
begins to resolve itself, the freeze happens and I switch to Fractint95
and it works. I call it fractint95 because the date on the file is 1995,
I think it is version 19.3 or 19.6.
The freeze happens at the boundary of the minibrot, about half way
through it. Exactly why or what is going on I do not know, I suspect an
endless loop - it never bails for some reason. If I save the image at
this point and reload it into fractint95 it continues normally. As to
the depth at which it occurs, it is between E+55 and E+89 obviously, but
I recall this happening many years ago also before I started making
animations, just deep stills.
I have all fractint versions since the "fractal creations" CD, which I
recall is version 16. They do not all behave the same! Some work for
some things and others don't. You may find this out if you do a lot of
experimenting.
I wish I could get the old versions just to check out - starting with
version 1.0 in 1987! Anyone know where / if these are available?
JoTz
