BTW, you might try starting a full-screen command line session and trying Fractint in that. XP may not support running a graphical DOS app inside a window on its desktop!

It doesn't. I plan on doing it full screen.

If you're going to multiboot, how about a FreeDOS partition with Fractint? If your video card supports VESA, then Fractint should be able to use it very well under DOS.

I'll try that. Thanks, Marco

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, David Jones wrote: (...)

You're welcome. Of course, when it's doing that, that's ALL it's doing. Fractint at its fastest - no multitasking! 8-)

The nub of mentioning this is that if you were multitasking e-mail or IRC composition while you were rendering a fractal, then your CPU load would be practically nil for the e-mail and IRC tasks, so that if you started a tesseral rendering before you started writing a message, then it would likely be finished long before you hit the send key. Surfing the web might be different, because decompressing JPEGs is fairly computing intensive, but twenty years ago, you could be using an instruction processor that ran at 8Mhz and supported a hundred users and you wouldn't notice their load until it was under 95% idle...which was mostly before eleven and before three in the day. Today, it's more like one user and a CPU that's over 99% idle (unless it has broadband internet or a large collection of DVDs, in which case it is likely very busy at the task of corrupting people). _______ Computers do a lot of work -- a lot of work that doesn't need doing. --Michael Litwyn ------- MandelBroh { z=fn1(pixel), c=fn2(pixel): z=z^real(P1) +c |z| <= imag(P1) } Fireworks { ; Anybody got a better way to see only the orbits? ; Symmetry assertion doesn't work due to persistent, ; infinitesimal skew. reset=2003 type=formula formulafile=fire.par formulaname=mandelbroh function=ident/conj passes=t center-mag=-0.455826/0/0.6835187/1.181/90/3.88578058618804789e-016 params=-2/16 float=y maxiter=255 inside=255 proximity=-0.025 outside=fmod symmetry=xaxis periodicity=0 showorbit=yes colors=@altern.map }

Try starting XP (press F8 during boot up to get the menu) in the Safe mode with command prompt. If this works, it won't allow you to run other programs while Fractint is running.

That's what I tried, but I couldn't find a video mode that would display.

I've never had any trouble with 95, 98, or ME running full screen. But, I seldom switch to other programs while I'm running Fractint.

Don't want to switch to other programs ;=)

The DOS source code has not been switched over to 32-bit, but you don't normally need to compile it because an executable is provided.

But I want to develop. Thanks, Marco

Marc Reinig wrote:

I tried [Fractint] with my command window on XP and only the menu would run. I suppose the disk mode would work, but I want to see it ;=)

I have had similar problems on some machines running XP. I have noticed that if I am just running a previously saved .PAR file, then the image is either 'garbled' or shows nothing at all. But when saved after the rendering has completed, the .GIF image is perfectly viewable as if there was no problem at all. You might try running the MAKEFCFG.EXE program after booting to Safe Mode when starting up your XP machine. This should generate a current and useable FRACTINT.CFG file that FractInt will use to determine the values needed for various adapter/mode choices.

I'm configuring a new multi-boot system and want to make sure I can run on it. What Windows OS can I use, or do I need to install DOS?

If you wanted to have a more flexible environment for using other applications (especially some older ones), then I would suggest using one of the Win-9x versions (preferably Windows-98 SE). This will allow you to occassionally run a few of those items that were once useful, but have never been upgraded for the newer systems.

Also, do I have to un-mothball my 16-bit compiler, or can I use Visual Studio 6?

You will probably get several error messages using MS-VC++ and need to do some major tweaking of references and compenents, but eventually it will complile and work. All of the various sources, and the executables are available from the Developers website: http://www/fractint.org/ftp/ Sincerely, P.N.L. ------------------------------------------------- http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/PNL_Fractals.html http://www.Nahee.com/Fractals/

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Marc Reinig wrote: (...)

What Windows OS can I use, or do I need to install DOS? (...) Windows has always been built on top of DOS, and few programmers would hav it any other way. If you right-click on the icon for your floppy, there'll options for formatting it as a DOS boot disk in most Windows versions.

Making a "Windows" partition that doesn't bring up the Graphic User Interface shouldn't be too many steps away if you like bootloaders in the style of GRUB, LILO, or partition magic and you know where the manual is. As far as compilers, I think Mister Osuch is using a DOS port of GCC (Gnu C Compiler, DJGPP), and this is a migration from MicroSoft's compiler, but Borland and Lattice should be doable, too. The hard part would be porting to a processor that isn't basically a clone of Intel, because I think I've read about some assembler macros in the code.