Aaron, I do not recommend crazy high values for the cycles variable, cycles=max is safer. On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 11:03 PM Aaron Eidinger <xiphiplastron@gmail.com> wrote:
As a (once avid) user for decades, I was hoping this would help with what I was seeing. When I tried setting to 500000 cycles, weird things happened.
In the last few days I’ve tried running under DOSBox-X you’ve provided, the VirtualBox .OVA I downloaded from fractint.net <http://fractint.net/>, and two different versions under Windows XP through VirtualBox. The fasted, by far, has been WinFract under XP on VirtualBox. At least I zoom into arbitrary precision and then it gets pretty slow.
Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
Part of my frustration is Fractint is familiar to me. I’ve tried other tools under Windows, but they lack something. Xaos, while relatively easy to navigate, can’t handle the deep zooms and the palette editing isn’t very intuitive to me.
I tried Kalles Fraktaler, but it lacks any kind of intuitiveness and I can’t seem to figure out how to make a “clean” image as all the results appear fuzzy. It appears the Maths Town YouTube channel uses this for their videos, but I can’t figure out how to get the same kind of imagery.
Any help would be grateful.
Thanks for this wonderful program. Over the years it’s been a source of calm, casual entertainment for me. Not as often as I used to, but I still come back to it.
—Aaron Eidinger
On Nov 28, 2020, at 6:47 PM, Timothy Wegner <tim@tswegner.net> wrote:
You piqued my interest. I also have an old slower machine that runs XP that runs Fractint natively, and it ran the default 1600x1200x256 Mandelbrot in 8.5 seconds, compared to 64 seconds under DOSBox. So the DOSBox scheme is not for serious fractal artists like yourself who want to crank out many high rez fractals.
Then it dawned on me that DOSBox is meant for games, that in many cases need to be speed limited. In just a few minutes I was able to speed up the 1600x1200 fractal by 60 times. Go to the DOSBox-X CPU menu, and click "edit cycles" and set it to a really big number like 500000. This reduced the generation time from over a minute to .4 seconds.
I challenge folks here to come up with an optimized run-as-fast-as-possibleDOSBox setting for Fractint.
Tim
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