Hi Richard,
Oh sweet! I will go through these. It looks like you didn't keep Jim's little essays for some of them. Oh well, the pars/frms are better than nothing 🙂
I didn't think we preserved the essays in the par archives. You may have seen various FTOD compilations that exist that have them. Paul Lee had one going, the links don't work 100 percent and many times the image wasn't preserved. But I'm encouraged at how well this works at all! http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/FotD/FotD.html It's a shame that 20 years ago it was about about preserving disk space. I probably has a lot of the essay's in the xmission Fractint Digests but wasn't saving them. Now that feels foolish!
Oh, lots of archived goodies there, thanks. Some of these programs were in danger of being lost to the winds of time. I have uploaded tierazon and flarium to github and a couple others.
I don't know if you've seen Paul's main page https://web.archive.org/web/20090815013739/http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/ and his software list page. What a job he was doing! https://web.archive.org/web/20090909005540/http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/F...
However, there are two variants of the formula parser/interpreter. There is the assembly language verison used by the DOS code and there is the C language version used by everything else. Where they diverge, I assume the bug is in the C code. Many of those that fail to render similar to fractint are using the exponentiation (^) operator in the formula. Sometimes use of fn[1-4] fails in the C formula code, but if you inline the actual function used into the formula, then it renders correctly.
Ultrafractal can supposedly interpret par files. I wonder if the writer knows what's up with it or perhaps the program has the same problems there.
Oh, that's good to know about the duplicate name problem. I have some ideas about improving management and sharing of these definitions as a longer term plan.
The Orgform project was an attempt to add a database of formulas to the system. This was an attempt at a grand compilation of every for forumula that ever existed! https://web.archive.org/web/20090909113555/http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/O... I see there is at least one github compilation of it. https://github.com/fract4d/formulas I have what I think was the last version of it in its original file format to download here. (The Jim Muth formulas were the last entry). There was a way to hook this into Fractint I think. https://interocitors.com/tmp/fractals/ORGFORM.ZIP Sorry if I'm telling you things you already know :) Roger