It would be interesting to objectify the discussion about speeds on different platforms. It certainly is possible to make informed (and strong) statements about what the performance should be under various environments, but there is nothing like actual tests. Of course trying to make meaningful benchmarks is fraught with difficulties and challenges, I'm not saying it would be easy. What might be useful is to find a fractal that runs properly on several pieces of software and compare on one machine under different environments. Or maybe several fractals, one that is running from an assembler implementation of a built-in fractal in the DOS Fractint and maybe one that uses the parser with a challenging formula. Run these two under naked DOS, Windows 95 or 98 or XP, and several virtual environments. Would be nice to find a fractal that also runs under Iterated Dynamics (easy since it runs nearly everything Fractint runs) and Manpwin or even Fractint for Windows (though the later is still 16 bit and so subject to Rich's hypothesis about 16 bit code being slow). Be aware that DOSBox was originally developed for gamers running old games, so it has mechanisms for intentionally slowing things down so they don't run too fast. For our purposes it needs to be set to run as fast as it can. See: http://www.dosbox.com/DOSBoxManual.html#SpeedHelpI t would be informative to compare DOSBox with other virtual environments on the same hardware. I am moving on implementing the wiki at Fractint.net. Not quite done and no content up yet, but this would be the perfect place for this sort of discussion and results. The holidays are looming, so we are probably talking January for the wiki to be operational. Tim