Hi, I've been using Fractint since version 16 or 17 I think. And just
last night I finnaly got around to coding some stuff in it. So far I've
written a new graphics driver for the Linux console framebuffer (It's alot
faster than X) But going through the code I've been thinking of 'tidying
up' a bit of the UI code.. basically putting all of the graphics routines
and keyboard/mouse input behind one general API, that the main program
would call. This will make porting fracting much much easier. The menus
can be abstracted too as well. I want to have a console Linux version
running that looks at feels exactly like the DOS version first. (Which is
what I'm doing now) but if I do it right you can just drop in code for
X11, or MacOS, or palm, or whatever and it'll at least work about the
same. For X11 and Windows, etc. ports the possibility of a GUI comes up as
well. (not that you couldn't do it anyway on everything else as we are
doing our own graphics anyway)
Anyway, my fear though is that I might break some of the old old DOS
code for talking to a Oaktek card on an 80286 or something. I don't have
the hardware at the moment to test any changes I make to make sure nothing
broke. (It shouldn't as I'd just put generic wrappers around what's there
now, but anyway...)
I'm also going to write some new pallette stuff, and I've been thinking
about writing in PNG support if that's ok with everyone.