Bill,
Yes, and this morning when I sat down to work on this restarting DOSBox did disable the ORBITSAVE=sound function, so that is a big relief. Very cumbersome, but doable.
Restarting Fractint should do it, but DOSBox may be saving everything in memory for a set amount of time before clearing it when you shut things down. That's a wild guess, with no merit.
While adding the PC speaker in your SDL version is a huge step forward for those few of us who enjoy this feature (and in many ways, I prefer the sound card emulation of the old PC speaker) , it is still quite limited without the ability to use the sound card as in the DOS version, I will need to continue using the DOS version in DOSBox for the foreseeable future. Is there no practical way to add an ORBITSAVE=no to the DOS version?
It is not impossible to fix the DOS version. I need to do it in DOSBox and I don't believe I still have the development environment set up. Haven't tried it in years. I think the last time I did, it took 30 minutes to compile. The sound card features would have to be emulated, since it is no longer possible to touch the hardware. I still don't have the PC speaker emulated quite right.
I don't recall this being a problem when using the DOS version on a DOS machine. I am attempting to fire up my 25yr old PII W98 to double check that (and sooo thankful not to have to deal with all the bugs and configuration issues in those days!). Surprise...the CMOS battery is dead... while waiting I had a thought. At some point, a decision was made to make the sound parameters "sticky" since there are so many of them. I have a feeling that decision may have been made after the last time I used the ORBITSAVE=sound feature and the problem may have been lurking there all this time, used by no one since! But now that the sound parameters are sticky, even disabling all of them by hand via <ctr><F> doesn't disable since there is nowhere to do so for the orbitsave.
Not being able to turn orbitsave off has always been a problem and it is a fluke that orbitsave=sound works at all. The following is TMI, but Tim might appreciate it. When the command is parsed, the current value of orbitsave is or'd with 2 (10 binary), setting the second bit. The logic then parses the Yes/No value (0 for No, 1 for Yes, and -1 for unknown) and or's the result with the current value of orbitsave. Since 'sound' or 's' is not 'y' or 'n', it is unknown and -1 (all ones in binary) is or'd. So all the bits are set. When the orbitsave variable is checked to see if we want to save to a sound.txt file, we check if (orbitsave & 2) is not equal to zero. Since orbitsave is all ones in binary, the check returns TRUE and we create the file. When orbitsave=sound is set, (orbitsave & 1) also always returns a TRUE, and we additionally generate an orbits.raw file for the acrospin data for the IFS and LORENZ fractal types. I will not fix the fluke, but will document it in the code.
If this is the case, and it can't be easily fixed, I would MUCH rather deal with the very rare need to restart DOSBox than have the sound parameters not be sticky.
The fix is easy. Compiling is less so. Jonathan