From: "SherLok Merfy" <brewhaha@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca> wrote:
On Fri, 7 May 2004, carenp wrote:
[...]
.3. on a related subject, does anyone know why i can't save a disk
video of
my creations in fractint 20.3? i'd like to push some out as far as 6000 x 4500, and i have the disk space and the processor to handle most of them...
Unless you can make batch mode work, my guess would be that you are trying to use NTFS.
I'm curious as to how the file system used could affect the "disk video" mode? As I understand it that mode uses whatever virtual memory is available-- might be extended, expanded or disk raw memory. Does fractint use low-level r/w routines that might cause access violations on an NTFS volume if used for virtual memory? From XP, I tried running separate copies of fractint 20.3.1 on each of a FAT16 and an NTFS volume in disk video mode, both successfully. Of course, 1 trial doesn't mean much. What I don't understand is why it seems nearly impossible for most of us to use the VESA VBE modes from a DOS VM under one of the NT-flavored Windows. Those modes obviously exist since they can be run from fractint dual-booted from the DOS7.1 command line. Even if they didn't, surely a virtual graphics driver for the VM environment to emulate the modes by forwarding them to OpenGL or similar ought to be an easily available thing, right? Something that you could just put in config.nt that read something like "device=vbeemu.sys". It would be really nice to be able to run fractint (visibly) in the background of XP while doing something else instead of rebooting all the time.
You'll hav to read the helpfiles with windows to re-size your partition and make a FAT16 or FAT32 partition, which is something that I've never done with Windows alone, but I've done it with the utilities that came with my hard drive.
Things may have changed since I last tried to use the Windows utilities for that, but my experience was they were dangerous: the data on a resized partition was typically made inaccessible (ie. lost without a whole lot of sector editing work). I found PartitionMagic to work much more reliably for that-- resizes w/o data loss, prepares all flavors of Windows and Linux volumes and comes with a multi-boot utility. I think you can get a copy for about $30 USD on eBay. If you're really foolhardy/bored like I once was, you can possibly use a sector editor to byte-edit the MBR and either accomplish the same goal or else end up spending a lot more $/time for data recovery services.
Welcome to the world of open source. (...)
Well, I did try to use the open source utility "dosbox 0.61" to run fractint (dosbox.sourceforge.net) under XP, and it did actually render fractals with a few VESA VBE emulated modes and retain the keystroke shortcuts. It was quite slow though, and "disk video" generation failed about mid-file on the one case I tried. OTOH it definitely proves that VBE emulation is possible within a DOS box. Regards, Hiram