This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters. The hardware requirements are: 1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support. I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from. There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right. Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine. When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished. On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program. I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives. Tim
Timothy Wegner wrote:
On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org.
Sounds like another easy way for people to get information, as long as it is navigable.
We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program.
The main page should have an index to where other resources may be found around the Internet, such as: my FractInt web page: http://www.nahee.com/Fractals/FractInt/index.html which has links to: The largest collection of old FractInt executables and source codes: http://www.nahee.com/Software/+FractInt_%28OLD%29/ The FractInt Formula (FRM) OrgForm Compilation: http://www.nahee.com/PNL/OrgForm.html Spanky Fractal Database http://www.nahee.com/spanky/ with the FractInt Web Pages http://www.nahee.com/spanky/www/fractint/fractint.html and several other collections of .PAR, .MAP, .L, .IFS, etc... Also O's Fractal Art Gallery: http://www.nahee.com/O/ Sincerely, P.N.L.
On 03/04/2014 11:47 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters.
The hardware requirements are:
1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support.
I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them.
IIRC, that's what fdisk is for, even with good old DOS.
This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from.
There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here:
that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right.
Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine.
When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished.
On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org <http://fractint.net/.org>. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program.
I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives.
Hmmm - could you make an ISO image of the USB drive and post it somewhere? I'd be interested in seeing if Unetbootin or even the old-fashioned *nix DD command could put the image onto another USB drive and see if it would work ... I've used that approach to put some Live Linux CDs onto USB drives, I think there's even a USB-hyrbid command or script around that's supposed to adjust things so you can install from the USB drive. (At least, the Musix 3.0 beta is trying that.) Useful in these days when many computers no longer include optical drives ... I'd be interested in testing your image. To make it even more convoluted ... it might be possible to use the ISO image as the "CD" to boot a VirtualBox VM with ... -- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
Hi David, Turned out that even though FreeDOS worked on one of my computers with no modifications, I did need to add some memory management in config.sys for other computers. I also found a few other things that I probably knew once and had forgotten, such as makefcfg is missing a DPMI management library compiled-in, but this is easily remedied. The FreeDOS OS and all the tools are open source and free, so I will be able to put together a package that will work. I can't promise a delivery time (we never promised anything when we were developing Fractint :-)) but I don't think it will take long. If anyone wants to try this, order some Sandisk Cruzer fit 8gb (maybe 16 gb works also) USB drives. They are pretty cheap. Tim
On 03/05/2014 05:16 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Hi David,
Turned out that even though FreeDOS worked on one of my computers with no modifications, I did need to add some memory management in config.sys for other computers. I also found a few other things that I probably knew once and had forgotten, such as makefcfg is missing a DPMI management library compiled-in, but this is easily remedied.
The FreeDOS OS and all the tools are open source and free, so I will be able to put together a package that will work. I can't promise a delivery time (we never promised anything when we were developing Fractint :-)) but I don't think it will take long.
If anyone wants to try this, order some Sandisk Cruzer fit 8gb (maybe 16 gb works also) USB drives. They are pretty cheap.
Sounds good! Another possibility would be to see if it would work on an SD card; a lot of netbooks and ultrabooks have built-in SD card readers can boot from them. -- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
Yes, I will also try an SD card. I think it works pretty much the same, though it might be harder to boot from on older machines. The Sandisk Cruzer Fit shows up as a hard drive on the bios boot menu. I will try and let you know. Starting to get really busy around here through the weekend, so probably next week at soonest. On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:23 PM, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
On 03/05/2014 05:16 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Hi David,
Turned out that even though FreeDOS worked on one of my computers with no modifications, I did need to add some memory management in config.sys for other computers. I also found a few other things that I probably knew once and had forgotten, such as makefcfg is missing a DPMI management library compiled-in, but this is easily remedied.
The FreeDOS OS and all the tools are open source and free, so I will be able to put together a package that will work. I can't promise a delivery time (we never promised anything when we were developing Fractint :-)) but I don't think it will take long.
If anyone wants to try this, order some Sandisk Cruzer fit 8gb (maybe 16 gb works also) USB drives. They are pretty cheap.
Sounds good! Another possibility would be to see if it would work on an SD card; a lot of netbooks and ultrabooks have built-in SD card readers can boot from them.
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
_______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint
Bill asked: What is the minimum storage size that would be required for the thumb/card?
What small size did you want? My assumption is that it is most convenient to have a standalone USB rive with room for FreeDOS, Fractint, and any fractals you create. This eliminates any need for FreeDos to access anything else on the computer. I dumped a huge fractint working directory I have will all kinds of unnecessary stuff, and still have way more than half of 8 gb free. I will give a more surgical answer, but I am guessing that multiple hundreds of megabytes (say 512 mb) is more than big enough. I even have some 32 mb flash drives that came out of new digital camera when they were replaced by large drives, this is probably enough. But why scrimp - the sandisk cruzer fit 8 gb costs about $8. (I only mention this particular one because I have it and know it works). By the way, much larger usb drives probably work, fat32 formatted partitions can be in the terabytes. I had forgotten that. Geeks can optimize the heck out of this. For example you could have FAT32 partitions on hard drives for storing fractals. But I am looked for something turnkey that works most of the time with minimal fuss and special exptertise. I should also say that I have been a big fan of DOSBox, because it runs fractint really well, great VESA video support, and runs under Windows, Mac, or Linux. But running benchmarks on the same machine shows that Fractint under FreeDos is more than twice as fast as running under DOSBox. I haven't verified that the intentional slowdowns of DOSBox to make games work right have been turned off in my setup (I think so). In any case, it stands to reason that running FreeDOS directly would beat a virtual machine for speed. I love the idea of using an old machine with no hard drives to generate fractals 24/7! Tim
The reason I asked is I have several smallish CF and SD cards...from 16mb to 2gb that I don't use. I just got through creating a bootable 1g SD card with freedos and fractint on it. I changed the bios on an older xp machine and it booted from the SD card inserted in a usb2 port...the SD card was in a portable usb reader. Fractint ran ok... didn't try 1600x yet, but 1024x was good. No sound though. The xp machine doesn't have an internal speaker, so i'll have to figure out how to get the sound card working with dos. I don't know if i'll really pursue that, since dosbox seems to work pretty well for my audio fractal work - which i hope to resume soon - and for that work I don't need speed. But i wanted to try the other option anyway. I was happy to see it working on a portable SD reader...cards are cheap. On Wednesday, March 5, 2014, Timothy Wegner <tim@tswegner.net> wrote:
Bill asked:
What is the minimum storage size that would be required for the
thumb/card?
What small size did you want?
My assumption is that it is most convenient to have a standalone USB rive with room for FreeDOS, Fractint, and any fractals you create. This eliminates any need for FreeDos to access anything else on the computer. I dumped a huge fractint working directory I have will all kinds of unnecessary stuff, and still have way more than half of 8 gb free. I will give a more surgical answer, but I am guessing that multiple hundreds of megabytes (say 512 mb) is more than big enough. I even have some 32 mb flash drives that came out of new digital camera when they were replaced by large drives, this is probably enough. But why scrimp - the sandisk cruzer fit 8 gb costs about $8. (I only mention this particular one because I have it and know it works). By the way, much larger usb drives probably work, fat32 formatted partitions can be in the terabytes. I had forgotten that.
Geeks can optimize the heck out of this. For example you could have FAT32 partitions on hard drives for storing fractals. But I am looked for something turnkey that works most of the time with minimal fuss and special exptertise.
I should also say that I have been a big fan of DOSBox, because it runs fractint really well, great VESA video support, and runs under Windows, Mac, or Linux. But running benchmarks on the same machine shows that Fractint under FreeDos is more than twice as fast as running under DOSBox. I haven't verified that the intentional slowdowns of DOSBox to make games work right have been turned off in my setup (I think so). In any case, it stands to reason that running FreeDOS directly would beat a virtual machine for speed. I love the idea of using an old machine with no hard drives to generate fractals 24/7!
Tim
Well, my folder containing Fractint and the Fractint Extras stuff occupies only 3.7MB. I don't recall that OpenDOS occupied gigabytes of space, so I'd think something like my little old 32MB SD card here would be more than enough. On 03/05/2014 03:10 PM, Bill Jemison wrote:
The reason I asked is I have several smallish CF and SD cards...from 16mb to 2gb that I don't use. I just got through creating a bootable 1g SD card with freedos and fractint on it. I changed the bios on an older xp machine and it booted from the SD card inserted in a usb2 port...the SD card was in a portable usb reader. Fractint ran ok... didn't try 1600x yet, but 1024x was good. No sound though. The xp machine doesn't have an internal speaker, so i'll have to figure out how to get the sound card working with dos. I don't know if i'll really pursue that, since dosbox seems to work pretty well for my audio fractal work - which i hope to resume soon - and for that work I don't need speed. But i wanted to try the other option anyway. I was happy to see it working on a portable SD reader...cards are cheap.
On Wednesday, March 5, 2014, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Bill asked:
What is the minimum storage size that would be required for the thumb/card?
What small size did you want?
My assumption is that it is most convenient to have a standalone USB rive with room for FreeDOS, Fractint, and any fractals you create. This eliminates any need for FreeDos to access anything else on the computer. I dumped a huge fractint working directory I have will all kinds of unnecessary stuff, and still have way more than half of 8 gb free. I will give a more surgical answer, but I am guessing that multiple hundreds of megabytes (say 512 mb) is more than big enough. I even have some 32 mb flash drives that came out of new digital camera when they were replaced by large drives, this is probably enough. But why scrimp - the sandisk cruzer fit 8 gb costs about $8. (I only mention this particular one because I have it and know it works). By the way, much larger usb drives probably work, fat32 formatted partitions can be in the terabytes. I had forgotten that.
Geeks can optimize the heck out of this. For example you could have FAT32 partitions on hard drives for storing fractals. But I am looked for something turnkey that works most of the time with minimal fuss and special exptertise.
I should also say that I have been a big fan of DOSBox, because it runs fractint really well, great VESA video support, and runs under Windows, Mac, or Linux. But running benchmarks on the same machine shows that Fractint under FreeDos is more than twice as fast as running under DOSBox. I haven't verified that the intentional slowdowns of DOSBox to make games work right have been turned off in my setup (I think so). In any case, it stands to reason that running FreeDOS directly would beat a virtual machine for speed. I love the idea of using an old machine with no hard drives to generate fractals 24/7!
Tim
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
David wrote: Well, my folder containing Fractint and the Fractint Extras stuff occupies
only 3.7MB. I don't recall that OpenDOS occupied gigabytes of space, so I'd think something like my little old 32MB SD card here would be more than enough.
I made a somewhat (but not completely) minimal bootable FreeDOS/Fractint on a 1gb flash drive, and FreeDOS and Fractint together take 3.28 mb. It also boots on my computer with AMD bios as a "hard drive". One very pleasant surprise is that I have both the CF and the USB drive plugged in at the same time, one (the one I booted from) is C: and the other is visible as D: !! So you could use a small CF or USB drive to boot and another larger one for fractals etc. This requires setting the bios to include some legacy USB support. I have another computer that is similar but older, and I cannot for the life of me get the usb drive to boot. A still older one is fine, go figure. Tim
Timothy Wegner wrote:
I have another computer that is similar but older, and I cannot for the life of me get the USB drive to boot. A still older one is fine, go figure.
I have found that it depends on the level of USB that you have installed on the computer, as well as the pluggin drive itself. Some thumb drives work on some of my older machines, and some do not. Sincerely, P.N.L.
Occurs to me that this thread is more appropriate for the fractdev mailing list than fractint, so I will crosspost this to fractdev, then follow up there. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be ANY discussion of booting fractint from USB here, but if we get into lengthy discussions of arcane hardware issues (which I certainly enjoy), we may be getting a little off topic for this list. We'll see how it goes. Anyone interested in sharing technical information about running fractint on various platforms please join me in Fractdev. When I have something to share with end users, I will report here. Please understand I am not trying to shush anyone up, so if you'd like to see this discussion here, by all means say so. Paul wrote:
I have found that it depends on the level of USB that you have installed on the computer, as well as the pluggin drive itself. Some thumb drives work on some of my older machines, and some do not.
The puzzle is that I have three self-built machines of different ages that all have Gigabyte motherboards, AMD chips, and Award bioses. The oldest and youngest boot USB and CF, but the middle machine does not. The point is that these are not dissimilar, just different ages. Doesn't worry me that one doesn't work, I guess I am just compulsive. I'll compare the bios settings, and see if there's some setting causing different behavior. I really want to try the middle machine because it is the only one with NVIDIA (non-motherboard) graphics, which some folks have suggested might have better VESA support. I do have a plan B. I found a 2.5 inch 80gb SATA drive in my junk drawer that came out of a Dell E1505 Laptop when I upgraded the drive. I'll blow away the XP on it and format with FreeDOS. That should certainly work in a dual boot configuration on the middle machine. Followups to fractdev please. Tim
Me, too! On 03/07/2014 11:13 AM, Bill Jemison wrote:
since you asked...I'd like to see the discussion here as well.
On 3/6/2014 4:17 PM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Occurs to me that this thread is more appropriate for the fractdev mailing list than fractint, so I will crosspost this to fractdev, then follow up there. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be ANY discussion of booting fractint from USB here, but if we get into lengthy discussions of arcane hardware issues (which I certainly enjoy), we may be getting a little off topic for this list. We'll see how it goes. Anyone interested in sharing technical information about running fractint on various platforms please join me in Fractdev. When I have something to share with end users, I will report here. Please understand I am not trying to shush anyone up, so if you'd like to see this discussion here, by all means say so. Paul wrote:
I have found that it depends on the level of USB that you have installed on the computer, as well as the pluggin drive itself. Some thumb drives work on some of my older machines, and some do not.
The puzzle is that I have three self-built machines of different ages that all have Gigabyte motherboards, AMD chips, and Award bioses. The oldest and youngest boot USB and CF, but the middle machine does not. The point is that these are not dissimilar, just different ages. Doesn't worry me that one doesn't work, I guess I am just compulsive. I'll compare the bios settings, and see if there's some setting causing different behavior. I really want to try the middle machine because it is the only one with NVIDIA (non-motherboard) graphics, which some folks have suggested might have better VESA support.
I do have a plan B. I found a 2.5 inch 80gb SATA drive in my junk drawer that came out of a Dell E1505 Laptop when I upgraded the drive. I'll blow away the XP on it and format with FreeDOS. That should certainly work in a dual boot configuration on the middle machine.
Followups to fractdev please.
Tim
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
Booting from built-in card readers is less predictable than USB flash drives. Toshiba netbooks seem to be able to boot from anything, including their built-in SD card readers. My months-old System76 Linux laptop doesn't offer its SD reader as a boot option at all. A friend of mine has a basic USB SD card reader that shows up as a boot option when there's an SD card in it. A lot of desktop machines don't offer options to boot from card readers. I guess they figure people will use their optical drives for booting. Looking forward to next week! On 03/05/2014 10:56 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Yes, I will also try an SD card. I think it works pretty much the same, though it might be harder to boot from on older machines. The Sandisk Cruzer Fit shows up as a hard drive on the bios boot menu. I will try and let you know. Starting to get really busy around here through the weekend, so probably next week at soonest.
On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:23 PM, david wrote:
On 03/05/2014 05:16 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:
Hi David,
Turned out that even though FreeDOS worked on one of my computers with no modifications, I did need to add some memory management in config.sys for other computers. I also found a few other things that I probably knew once and had forgotten, such as makefcfg is missing a DPMI management library compiled-in, but this is easily remedied.
The FreeDOS OS and all the tools are open source and free, so I will be able to put together a package that will work. I can't promise a delivery time (we never promised anything when we were developing Fractint :-)) but I don't think it will take long.
If anyone wants to try this, order some Sandisk Cruzer fit 8gb (maybe 16 gb works also) USB drives. They are pretty cheap.
Sounds good! Another possibility would be to see if it would work on an SD card; a lot of netbooks and ultrabooks have built-in SD card readers can boot from them.
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
As I speak I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 , from a 16GB USB ROM Stick . There's a menu option , at boot up , to go to either Ubuntu, the default , or Windows . To try out FreeDos as you recommend , I'd need to obtain another USB Stick . Another possibility , though possibly slower , use Wine with Ubuntu to run Fractint . Will FreeDOS run on 64 bit machines ? On 05/03/2014 09:47, Timothy Wegner wrote:
This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters. The hardware requirements are: 1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support. I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from. There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ [1] that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right. Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine. When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished. On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org [2]. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program. I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives. Tim
Links: ------ [1] http://rufus.akeo.ie/ [2] http://fractint.net/.org
FreeDOS will run on a 64bit Core2 Intel (I have tested on a Dell 755, Dell 760, and a Dell 780) (installed on hard drive and also from USB drive) FreeDOS will also run in a Virtual Machine (I have tested on Oracle Virtual Box, under Ubuntu 12 / 13 and under Mint 15 / 16 and under Fedora 17 / 18 / 19 / 20) ... you have control of how much processor time you give the virtual machine and how much memory. On 06/07/2014 03:10 AM, sciwise@ihug.co.nz wrote:
As I speak I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 , from a 16GB
USB ROM Stick .
There's a menu option , at boot up , to go to either Ubuntu, the default , or Windows .
To try out FreeDos as you recommend , I'd need
to obtain another USB Stick .
Another possibility , though possibly slower ,
use Wine with Ubuntu to run Fractint .
Will FreeDOS run on 64 bit machines ?
On 05/03/2014 09:47, Timothy Wegner wrote:
This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters. The hardware requirements are: 1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support. I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from. There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right. Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine. When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished. On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org <http://fractint.net/.org>. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program. I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives. Tim
_______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint
-- -David David W Riccio david@lemoncreekdigital.com Lemon Creek Digital (907) 780-6122 www.lemoncreekdigital.com
Hmm, never tried FreeDOS under a VM. On a multicore processor, you could give the FreeDOS VM one core to itself. That should minimize impact on anything else the system is doing. On 06/07/2014 10:05 AM, David W Riccio wrote:
FreeDOS will run on a 64bit Core2 Intel (I have tested on a Dell 755, Dell 760, and a Dell 780) (installed on hard drive and also from USB drive)
FreeDOS will also run in a Virtual Machine (I have tested on Oracle Virtual Box, under Ubuntu 12 / 13 and under Mint 15 / 16 and under Fedora 17 / 18 / 19 / 20) ... you have control of how much processor time you give the virtual machine and how much memory.
On 06/07/2014 03:10 AM, sciwise@ihug.co.nz wrote:
As I speak I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 , from a 16GB
USB ROM Stick .
There's a menu option , at boot up , to go to either Ubuntu, the default , or Windows .
To try out FreeDos as you recommend , I'd need
to obtain another USB Stick .
Another possibility , though possibly slower ,
use Wine with Ubuntu to run Fractint .
Will FreeDOS run on 64 bit machines ?
On 05/03/2014 09:47, Timothy Wegner wrote:
This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters. The hardware requirements are: 1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support. I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from. There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right. Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine. When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished. On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org <http://fractint.net/.org>. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program. I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives. Tim
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--
-David
David W Ricciodavid@lemoncreekdigital.com Lemon Creek Digital (907) 780-6122 www.lemoncreekdigital.com
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
Yes, that is the config I am running, give the DOS VM a core for it's own and let it use 100% ... even on a Core2 this does not really impact your ability to do other things while the Fractal Machine is running. On a 4Core machine I have run 3 copies of the VM with not much impact to the host. This will work with FreeDOS VM and Microsoft DOS VMs, It will also run under a WinXP VM, and a Win98 VM. The most stable platform for the VMs with the least problems seems to be Mint 16 (about March, 2014 vintage + patches)... But all the Debian variation seem to work OK ... Use the Virtual Box that is in the standard software library (I have had problems using the latest versions on the Oracle site, there are issues with compatible libraries, etc) Moving images from the Dos VM Hard Drive can be an issue ... you need to setup a shared drive and networking under DOS ... FreeDOS has tools for this, also MS DOS has access to Microsoft's Networking tools. But it can be a pain to get everything talking. The Oracle extensions will work under WinXP and let the WinXP machine share a drive space with the host. -David On 06/07/2014 12:08 PM, david wrote:
Hmm, never tried FreeDOS under a VM. On a multicore processor, you could give the FreeDOS VM one core to itself. That should minimize impact on anything else the system is doing.
On 06/07/2014 10:05 AM, David W Riccio wrote:
FreeDOS will run on a 64bit Core2 Intel (I have tested on a Dell 755, Dell 760, and a Dell 780) (installed on hard drive and also from USB drive)
FreeDOS will also run in a Virtual Machine (I have tested on Oracle Virtual Box, under Ubuntu 12 / 13 and under Mint 15 / 16 and under Fedora 17 / 18 / 19 / 20) ... you have control of how much processor time you give the virtual machine and how much memory.
On 06/07/2014 03:10 AM, sciwise@ihug.co.nz wrote:
As I speak I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 , from a 16GB
USB ROM Stick .
There's a menu option , at boot up , to go to either Ubuntu, the default , or Windows .
To try out FreeDos as you recommend , I'd need
to obtain another USB Stick .
Another possibility , though possibly slower ,
use Wine with Ubuntu to run Fractint .
Will FreeDOS run on 64 bit machines ?
On 05/03/2014 09:47, Timothy Wegner wrote:
This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters. The hardware requirements are: 1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive 2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support. I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from. There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here: http://rufus.akeo.ie/ that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right. Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine. When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished. On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org <http://fractint.net/.org>. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program. I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives. Tim
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--
-David
David W Ricciodavid@lemoncreekdigital.com Lemon Creek Digital (907) 780-6122 www.lemoncreekdigital.com
-- -David David W Riccio david@lemoncreekdigital.com Lemon Creek Digital (907) 780-6122 www.lemoncreekdigital.com
David et al, If any of you get something running Fractint relating to VMs or FreeDOS of general interest that could be put online, let me know. I realize the challenge is making something that broadly works. I intended (and still intend) to make a USB image available, have had too much going on recently to quite get it finished. Works on most of my computers. Tim
I'm sure this has been asked and answered in the past and will be what counts for a dumb question at this point, but ... Can you install Dosbox on a thumb drive and run Fractint from it, assuming space isn't a problem on the thumb drive? Mike
On 06/10/2014 07:34 PM, Mike Traynor wrote:
I'm sure this has been asked and answered in the past and will be what counts for a dumb question at this point, but ...
Can you install Dosbox on a thumb drive and run Fractint from it, assuming space isn't a problem on the thumb drive?
DosBox emulates a DOS PC. DosBox runs under some other operating system, like Linux or Windows or such. So if your thumb drive has the space to install the host OS (Linux, Windows, Such), you could install DosBox on the thumb drive after you install the host OS, and add Fractint to DosBox. Then you'd boot off the thumb drive into the Linux/Windows/Such OS on it, and run DosBox and then run Fractint from DosBox. That could work. Or you could use one of the Live Linuxes around like Ubuntu or KNOPPIX that can run from a thumb drive with a persistent home (or settings?) also located on the thumb drive. I think then you can boot that, install DOSBox (if needed) and Fractint, and run Fractint via DOSBox under Linux. Or you could grab the FreeDOS images mentioned earlier, follow their instructions for installing it (I think they cover how to install it to a thumb drive), add Fractint to the thumb drive, and boot FreeDOS on the thumb drive. Lots of possibilities, none of which I've personally tried since all my systems have Linux and DOSBox installed, and my main system has DOS Fractint that runs under DOSBox. -- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com
Yes, but since DosBOX is a virtual operating system, it still requires that your computer is running something else. So it's not like booting FreeDOS from a thumb drive. On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 10:31 AM, Paul N. Lee <Paul.N.Lee@att.net> wrote:
Mike Traynor wrote:
Can you install Dosbox on a thumb drive and run Fractint from it, assuming space isn't a problem on the thumb drive?
Yes !! :-)
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participants (7)
-
Bill Jemison -
david -
David W Riccio -
Mike Traynor -
Paul N. Lee -
sciwise＠ihug.co.nz -
Timothy Wegner