David is a linux user, and runs his appliance with no trouble under linux. I briefly tested it under Windows 8.1, and had no difficulty. You will need Oracle VirtualBOX installed on your system. There are few tricks to using VirtualBOX, mainly how it handles the mouse cursor, but by and large I found running fractint to be straightforward. If anyone cares to write a few instructions, I will get them posted. (I'll be away for a few weeks, so will not be able to respond as quickly as I would like if someone sends me something.)

I continue to be amazed how there are multiple ways to continue to run Fractint, a DOS program, on modern machines. Here's a very crude listing of some of the ways, including a few pros and cons.

1. Booting FreeDOS directly from a USB drive.

Pros - the fastest option

        - usb drive provides a way to save the resulting fractals.

Cons - some machines won't boot from USB drive

         - needs some add-ons to get best possible vesa support

2. DOSBox:

Pros - terrific vesa video support, especially if you use the svn version

         - runs under many OS's

         - easy to update fractint

Cons -  slower because it is a virtual machine.

         - needs a little more setup, less turnkey.

3. Virtual Appliance:

Pros - turnkey solution

        - runs under just about any OS

Cons -  slower because it is a virtual machine.

         - a bit of work to update fractint

4. Run under older Windows (XP or earlier)

Pros - machine can run developer environment

Cons - have to keep old machine or multi-boot environment around.

Feel free to chime in if I didn't get something quite right. I would be curious to know pros and cons of DOSBox and virtual appliance approaches from other people's perspectives. They seem similar, albeit implemented differently, but I would think there are higher resolution options with DOSBox.

Tim