Rich,
Yes I remember the old true colour mode and it was not much use as it only gave shades of blue as no translation was done to the iteration count. [...]
Is this what currently happens? I have a feeling you might not have tried the truecolor support that is currently there.
No. The truecolor support uses the currently loaded 256-color palette. With the Allegro driver, I put the iteration count in a separate memory space. The intent was to enable the getcolor() routine to return the actual iteration count instead of a number mapped to the 0 to 255 range. This would be needed to get truecolor to work with boundary tracing.
At any rate, there's still quite a bit of work to be done before incorporating new features. As Jonathan points out, I still need to get the X11 driver working and all the existing features need to be heavily tested before we merge this into the HEAD.
You may be surprised by what doesn't work. Look at solid-guessing and boundary tracing. I never did get them to work with the Allegro driver.
Additionally, I'd like to have the polling architecture exchanged for a true event architecture before we add new features. This would mean separating out the calculation code from the UI code. Currently the two are a little intermingled with the calculation code periodically asking "has a key been pressed?" and then deciding what to do about the keystroke. Once the UI and calculation engine have been separated out a little more, then I feel it would be time to start incorporating new features and fractal types.
Doesn't the WinFract code do this, after a fashion? Jonathan