Hal Lane wrote:
I believe that there may be some significant differences in the DOS environment that DOS programs "see" between WinXP and Win98 (where you could actually boot into the Win98 version of DOS.)
I've had a situation with fractals that *would* calculate successfully at 640x480 in Disk Video Mode, but become corrupted when two copies of FRACTINT.EXE were running (calculating different fractals) in two 32-bit WinXP DOS CMD windows at the same time.
I seem to remember that I could have several fractals being calculated simultaneously in DOS fractint in separate DOS windows (on the Win98 Windows desktop) and they would all calculate correctly.
I used to try DOS Fractint under W98SE. All it would do is freeze the machine as Fractint and W98 fought over the display adapter. Clearly you had more cooperative video hardware under Windows than I did! On the same machine, I also ran OS/2 Warp 3. DOS Fractint ran FLAWLESSLY, including generating images in the background even when its window was minimized.
When doing the same thing in WinXP I find that one fractal will corrupt another being calculated at the same time -- almost as if the two copies of Fractint in the two 32-bit WinXP DOS CMD windows were sharing some of the same memory.
I wouldn't be surprised if WinXP is actually running the separate CMD windows in a shared memory space. But that could just be my opinion of WinXP. When I run DOS Fractint now, it's running under DOSBox on Linux and works (albeit too slowly to be worthwhile). XFractint runs full speed and works well for me. There's also a Windows version of Fractint running around, maybe that would be an option for Windows users? -- David gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community