I don't think the problem is necessarily the OS, but the drivers. I run Fractint fine on my present and previous hardware under OS/2, with no problems. On the previous hardware (dualbooting between Windows 95/98 and OS/2) - Fractint ran find under OS/2, in all video modes my adaptors (no Matrox - Elsa GLoria Synergy or Voodoo 3000) supported, but the entire system would freeze solid if I tried to run it under Windows. I suspect that some Windows graphics drivers, and some video hardware, cooperates better with Fractint under Windows than others do. And I long ago decided not to rely on Windows drivers when it came to what my video hardware could do. I used to have an IBM PS/2 at my office, running PC-DOS and Windows 3.1. The Windows 3.1 drivers could provide a whopping 800x600x256 colors at a pathetic interlaced refresh rate. Running Fractint without Windows led me to the interesting discovery that the PS/2 machine's video hardware supported 1600x1200x56 colors at a non-interlaced 85Hz refresh rate. Too bad no Windows driver every supported that setting! The office PCs now have Windows XP Pro, but I've not tried running Fractint on it. Got too much other stuff doing at work to get to play with fractals there, although I very rarely fire up ChaosPro on the W98 PC and poke around a bit. David gnome@hawaii.rr.com david wrote:
What difficulty does everyone have using fractint under XP ? I use it on my laptop and swap freely between fractint and other windows programs. This would seem to indicate that there is nothing implicitly conflicting betwwen the two. I have problems with fractint and display drivers when using it on my desktop, but that's more to do with the fact that I have a matrox parhelia card. Fractint itself will run fine, but I can only get low reolution display. I think a DOS boot disk would give me the same problems, but I can't check it out as all my disks are NTFS formatted. What does fractint do on those systems that can't cope with it ?