Albrect,
The reason is that in the past I could be sure that all improvements were "safe" and allowed going on in the development.
That is not strictly true. You are using the developmental version and there is always the possibility for some feature being broken. There is clearly no guarantee as stated on the What's new page in Help.
That has changed and there is no room for improvements anymore, even if I replace outdated code. This happened when all commands dealing with function conflicts could be deleted with the new version and replaced by the commands to replace default functions - consuming less buffer space. Nevertheless I now must face the lack of memory crashes, apparently already with simple generation - in Jack´s case.
I did not have any problems with my development environment, which is why I released it. You pointed out a problem, and I have started working on a solution. I will not simply back out the changes, since that will cause Xfractint to not be able to run your formulas, which was the point of the patch in the first place. I need to collect some empirical data comparing formula string size to the final formula memory size and then extrapolate out to the 96K limit of the available extraseg memory for both DOS and Linux since the data structures are of different sizes. There is the caveat that since the extraseg memory is shared memory, it is possible to overrun memory used for other features. You may run into this when switching to a text mode and then back to your image, for instance. I do not, however, need prodding. I work on Fractint as time allows. Having to rebuild my Win XP development environment recently when the hard disk crashed has not helped. Jonathan