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Re: [Fractint] My two cents worth...
by Rupert Millard 26 Oct '02

26 Oct '02

Hello all I have found Fractint works *better* under Windows XP than it ever did under 98 on the same computer (PIII 500MHz, 192 Mb Ram, AOpen PA3000) Unfortunately my experience will not help any of you as I didn't have to do anything to get it to start. Consequently I believe that hardware must play a large factor. The improvement over Win 98, is that when I'm in a high resolution video mode and I alt+tab to windows, when I return to Fractint, its text menus are now not corrupted. Now, does any one care what someone who can barely program thinks? As people want a native Windows version and Tim says that it cannot be GPLed without rewriting parts of it, I think perhaps rewriting it from scratch might be a good idea. The code could be object-oriented and typesafed. If this were to happen, I would help as much as I could, but I could probably only add new fractal types and write help. This might break backwards compatibility, but unless Fractint as it is can be kept alive indefinitely, it is something that has to be done sooner rather than later, before even more people aren't able to run the last version, before this new one. Ultimately, Frederick Slijkerman, whom I believe is only (ironic coming from someone 2/3rds his age!) 24, single handedly wrote a program better than fractint. Surely the people on this list, have at least a century of experience between them. In case any body needs it spelt out, I'm suggesting that we write an open source clone of Ultra Fractal, call it Fractint and run it on Linux and Windows. Everything couldn't come at once, but once the stone's in the pot, people will start contributing. :-) Rupert >From: John Lewis <jlewis(a)clara.net> >Reply-To: fractint(a)mailman.xmission.com >To: <fractint(a)mailman.xmission.com> >Subject: Re: [Fractint] My two cents worth... >Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 18:28:57 +0100 > >On Fri, 25 Oct 2002 12:17:55 -0400, nick.grasso(a)hrads.com wrote: > > > >Well, I would be willing to pay for an upgrade, but I don't think >that's the main problem. > > >First of all, I think it's more of a problem with time rather than >money. Anybody with the skill to rewrite Fractint probably already >has a full-time, well-paying programming job. I don't think the job >of rewriting Fractint can be done in any reasonable length of time by >somebody (or even more than one person) working part-time in the >evening. And I don't think anybody is going to quit their full-time >job to do it as it is doubtful they would make much money with >shareware revenue. > > >Secondly, and more important to me, is that Fractint is open source. >I believe in the open source concept, *not* because it allows me to >get free software, but because of all the other advantages it has. In >fact, it would probably violate the copyright to turn Fractint into >shareware. I doubt if Tim would allow it. > > > >I think one problem that needs to be thought about is that most home >PCs are now sold with Windows XP, and as has been indicated in recent >correspondence, there seem to be problems with getting it to run >under XP. It is not always convenient to have to specially install a >second operating system, and if the price for using Fractint is to >purchase an old copy of Windows (while it is still available), it >does mean Fractint becomes quite expensive. > >I am considering moving to XP in the hope that it will cure some of >the Windows Me annoyances. > >I would not wish to see Fractint disappear. > >John >-- John Lewis, jlewis(a)clara.net on 25/10/2002 _________________________________________________________________ Unlimited Internet access for only $21.95/month. Try MSN! http://resourcecenter.msn.com/access/plans/2monthsfree.asp

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Patch 5 and 6
by Jonathan Osuch 22 Oct '02

22 Oct '02

Tim, I will probably put out two patches simultaneously, instead of including Charlie's virtual screen changes in a combined patch. This will make it easier to find problems if any should occur. The other changes are getting lost with all the changes Charlie is making for virtual screens. Jonathan

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Fwd: Mac Os X Port
by Scott D. Boyd 08 Oct '02

08 Oct '02

I received the following email yesterday. Apparently he sent it to me because of my Xfractint binary on my Website. I hadn't thought about the possibility of this before. Could he possibly compile the Xfractint source on Mac OS X? Comments, thoughts anyone? Any developers on this list with a Mac that like to give it a try? Until later, Scott ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Mac Os X Port Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 08:04:18 +0200 From: Franck Mignot <fmignot(a)easyconnect.fr> To: sdboyd56(a)swbell.net Hello, I am a Mac Os X user since a few (I was a pc user). I wonder if there is a package for Mac OS X of Fractint since this Os is a Unix BSD and I run X11 and X11 apps with it. Have a very nice day :-) Franck from Paris

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ATI Radeon video mode support?
by Rich 13 Sep '02

13 Sep '02

Hi guys... I haven't run FRACTINT for a long time, but when I tried recently I found that my ATI Radeon supported very few video modes. Does anyone know how to fix this? -- 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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Patch 5 and other BS
by Jonathan Osuch 30 Aug '02

30 Aug '02

Tim, I'm working on putting together patch 5. It will have Charlie's video.asm patch, an evolver bug fix, and the upper/lower case filename fix for Xfractint. Is there anything else that needs to get in? I've switched to a DSL carrier in Illinois, so I'm trying to get it to send email from the Avalon account. If you aren't reading this, I didn't succeed. 8-)) Jonathan

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Some bugs. Fixups useless?
by Charlie Chernohorsky 10 Jul '02

10 Jul '02

Hi all, this is my first post.. :ox Since bug-list is suffering nowadays, I repost it here: (and just hope this isn't a faux pas) 1. L-system "Thinking" screen freezes up upon this: (Under W98 it announces a restricted instruction or st. like that) Bug { angle 6 axiom F F=[F+F- F=-F+F] } It's somehow caused by spliting related push-pops into multiple lines. 2. Vertical lines all over the screen, when using mode with color bit depth more than 4 bits (16 colors) on a Chips&Techs card. It supports VESA well enough and my own plotings are clear. None of the textsafe options did help. 3. Therefore while wondering thru video.asm I found some bad things: VESAtruewrite in 24+b/color mode forms B-G-B instead of R-G-B (caused by commenting out some lines, but most of the cards require B-G-R anyway, so that branch is rarely passed thru I guess) VESAtruewrite/read and put/gettruecolor in 24+b/color mode call VESAtrueaddr three times! (While calling it once is enough!) So, I rewrote these, it now does about 150% of job in the same time. But then I realised that development is possibly heading a very different way (no asm), so my last question is, should I send video.asm fixups to someone or instantly throw away? thanx, charlie ______________________________________________________________________ Reklama: Volkswagen nyni nabizi akcni model Golf Edition s klimatizaci v cene 36 900 Kc zdarma. http://ad2.seznam.cz/redir.cgi?instance=28672%26url=http://www.volkswagen.c…

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Fwd: XFractint 20.02.4 boundary tracing bug on 24-bit servers
by Scott D. Boyd 25 Jun '02

25 Jun '02

I'm forwarding the following email (bug report) to this list. I was able to reproduce the bug described in his email, although I run a 16-bit X-server. I don't *think* the bug is only in my pre-compiled Xfractint package. Jonathan or Tim - can you reproduce the bug? Scott Boyd ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: XFractint 20.02.4 boundary tracing bug on 24-bit servers Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 00:29:43 +0300 From: George Tsegas <gtseg(a)skiathos.physics.auth.gr> To: sdboyd56(a)swbell.net Hello there. I recently downloaded the XFractint 20.02.4 binary from your web page. The "hit feature" of this release is, of course, its support for non-8-bit color depths, which is really convenient since there's no need any more to start a seperate 8-bit X-server in order to run xfractint correctly. I stumbled on one minor bug, though, that seems to be related to the 24-bit color depth support: using the "Boundary Tracing" drawing mode in some cases seems to lead to an infinite loop: XFractint seems to "freeze", drawing halts and the program only responds to <Ctrl>+C. The bug is reproducible by starting xfractint (on a 24-bit server), then choosing "Run saved command set" and selecting Peter Moreland's "Blue" command set from the file "fractint.par". It stops after only a small line segment is drawn on the top-left corner of the window. Same thing happens with other fractal types too, though not always. The exact same procedure does work correctly on an 8-bit server, on the same machine. Hardware: Athlon XP 1900+, 512MB DDR RAM (standard clocking) Gainward/NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4400 (standard clocking) Software: RedHat Linux 7.2 (+all the official RedHat updates) Kernel 2.4.9 glibc 2.2.4 XFree86 4.1.0, server running @ 1280x1024x24bit NVidia closed-source kernel module + GLX driver, ver. 1.0 29.60 KDE 2.2.2 ('official' RedHat packages) Thanks again for your effort. Please let me know if I should forward this bug report to somebody from the {X}fractint development team. -- George Tsegas gtseg(a)skiathos.physics.auth.gr "The only real way to look younger is not to be born so soon."

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www.fractint.org mirror
by Scott D. Boyd 17 Jun '02

17 Jun '02

I now have a mirror of www.fractint.org up and running. It's at: http://fractint.dyndns.org Tim - if you'd like to, you can now add the URL to the main Web site when you have time. Until later, Scott Boyd

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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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XFractint source file permissions
by Jonathan Osuch 09 Jun '02

09 Jun '02

Tim, How do we want the permissions set on all the source files? Do we want to modify the distribution to change all the instances where file names contain capital letters? I know, I just fixed Xfractint so this would work, but I find the capital letters irritating. Jonathan

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