On 5/9/2015 2:00 PM, fractint-request@mailman.xmission.com wrote:
I would like to give Mandel Machine a try, but I don't have 64bit WinDoZe, and it looks like MM doesn't have a 32bit version.
I would try it near the point where the 2 main bulbs intersect. It is very difficult to access with FractInt or any other fractal program. I did one zoom-in to that point and it took forever to get even to E+12.
Also, MM says it has an iteration limit of 400 million - it needs to do better than that for infinite zooms. FractInt still wins with it's 2.1 BILLion max iter!
MM seems to be nice and speedy but maps are a nuisance. You can import most images (literately pictures) and form a map by sampling the colors from it. The closest I could get to Fractint's default map was to capture the image of the default scene and sample that and it wasn't very good. I wonder if the MM developer could include the default Fractint map in the list? He has Ultrafractal's default map so it seems only fair. MM breaks down at being speedy in areas around the bulbs with the background detritus (I think Jim Muth had a better description here... high iteration background stuff?). I believe for the MM deep zoom video they hung around Scepter Valley were there wasn't so much of this. It seems even with the new math, if all the pixels in a scene are chaotic, it takes similarly as long to calculate the image as just plain iterating. Fractint is still king imho. I have been a long time user of Ubuntu Linux run under the freeware Oracle VM Virtualbox. I was just looking at xfractint package. While it needs some work, I am truly impressed. The performance is simply super. The display had a refresh problem but moving the window a tad refreshed it (this might be a problem caused by running under the VM). Many fractals were already done in just a few seconds. The keyboard menu was nearly the same. If I new the directory structure for the local files I would relocate what I have from dosbox over to Linux. There are differences in the Linux world that don't make sense from the Dos world. e.g. to change resolution, under the delete key it would (ideally) just change the windows size nicely for you. I believe that it could even have the color rotation by refreshing the image after each color change. (I've seen this work under GLUT programming but I am getting into too much tech). If a stone soup approach could be made to develop Fractint on Linux it would be one super program. It already is in many ways, it just needs a little honing. Seeing what I have seen it should the primary platform for development. I will try to find one of Jim Muths fractals where he documents the generation time. I will try it under Dosbox then under the Linux version after understanding the local environment. I have some learning to do so this may be a while.