JackOfTradeZ wrote:
You gotta be losing some performance with all the hardware/software translation in any emulation setup.
What am I missing here?
David has a good reply to this also. Let me just say, I have a Win7 64 bit machine that I built without Fractint in mind, and I got DOSBOX and Fractint up and running in just a few minutes. This is a huge advantage for people casually using the DOS fractint or who want to use it along side other things they are doing. Apparently it works everywhere - Linux and MacOS also. There is no question that DOSBOX slows things down a lot. I don't know if a DOSBOX environment would be satisfactory for someone doing really serious fractal generation as some here do. My impression was it behaved pretty well, maybe speed is less an issue than bug-free execution. But I wouldn't argue. There are alternatives - Rich's windows version and Jonathan's windows version (in XP compatability mode). I haven't done benchmarks to see which is faster. Two DOSBOX tips. 1. I found I couldn't type "\" needed for the "mount c c:\fractint" command. One cure is to use alt-92. A better one is to put the mount command in the moral equivalent of autoexec.bat. I haven't tried that, but it would be a real convenience. 2. I found a couldn't save a fractal. The cure was to right click on the DOSBOX icon on the Windows 7 64bit desktop, and select "troubleshoot compatability". Some magic happened and then it was OK from then on, this was a one time fix. All the above said, if one can boot native DOS (or FreeDOS) that would undoubtedlywork well and would probably runh faster. You'd have to use a PS-2 mouse and keyboard unless there are DOS USB drivers, and youy'd have to maintain an MS-DOS partition. I'd be curious to try, but not enough hours in the day to try everything I am curious about ... :-) Tim