August 2004 - Fractdev - mailman.xmission.com

Athlon woes
by Tim Wegner 02 Sep '08

02 Sep '08

I built a computer last year using an Athlon with a Gigabyte motherboard. I had troubles with Fractint - with any SVGA mode the computer would hang after the completion of the image. I always assumed this was an Windows XP issue. Today I tried Fractint with freedos on the same computer, with the same results. So apparently it's an incompatability bgetween fractint and my compuiter. Truecolor, 320x200, diskvideo, and even tweaked modes work. SCGA modes fail, and only after the image completes. This behavior appears to have nothing to do with recent versions. Has anyone else had trouble with Athlon? Hmm, maybe I need to look at bios settings. Tim

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Patch 6
by Jonathan Osuch 02 Jul '05

02 Jul '05

Tim, I'm going to try to wrap up patch 6 this week. So far, this is what I have: Fixed FPUcplxdiv and FPUcplxlog routines in fpu087.c to match assembler code. Fixed it so spaces are recognized in PAR entry names. Fixed evolver parameter entry. Fixed hypercomplex fractal type to turn off symmetry when a cj parameter is used. Fixed the plasma type to show the value of the parameter that is actually used in the image generation. Fixed the plasma type so that a parameter file uses the included colors instead of the default colors. Revised the plasma type prompt to reflect the values that could actually be used. Fixed inside=atan and outside=atan to use the full color palette instead of limiting to 180 colors. Modified the resume code to remove the Xfractint specific sections since they are no longer needed. I still need to move all this over to DOS and make sure nothing is broken. There are other fixes I would like to include, but haven't done them yet. Jonathan

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Xfractint with newton and newtbasin types
by Jonathan Osuch 23 Aug '04

23 Aug '04

Tim, Have you tried the newton and newtbasin types using Xfractint lately? They seem to be broken on my machine. Jonathan

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CVS repository
by Rich 16 Aug '04

16 Aug '04

OK, I think I've got it figured out. If you set it up to use ssh, then if you have the public key on the server's authorized_keys file, then you can execute any command on the server. So the downside to using this technique for fractint developers is that you are trusting those developers to arbitrary shell commands on the server. I could enquire at XMission about an account just for fractint developers and there would be minimal side effects to allowing open ssh access to developers. XMission provides free 50 MB accounts to non-profit organizations. It would be better if we just setup sourceforge with fractint using some license that's more permissive than the GPL. Then we could do the same thing on sourceforge and wouldn't have to setup anything weird. Can't we be covered under the X Window System license? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline"-- code samples, sample chapter, FAQ: <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/> Pilgrimage: Utah's annual demoparty <http://pilgrimage.scene.org>

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gmane
by Tim Wegner 15 Aug '04

15 Aug '04

I got an email suggesting our lists be registered with gmane.org. Gmane is a mailing list to newsgroup gateway. Does anyone know anything about this? I queried the fellow who suggested it and the answers to my questions are below. Tim >Would gmane subscribers be able to post to fractint without being >fractint members? You can choose whether people are allowed to post through Gmane. If you do allow Gmane postings, you can still configure your mail server to reject messages from nonsubscribers - so someone would have to subscribe to the list even if they were using Gmane to post messages. This seems a bit icky to me but some do it. >Would people's emails be exposed? You can choose this too - Gmane has address encryption, which is real encryption rather than obfuscation. Each address is replaced with one @gmane.org, and mail sent to that address goes through a challenge-response check before being forwarded to the real address. See <http://gmane.org/tmda.php>. >What are the pros and cons of doing this? Many people find using a newsreader more convenient than subscribing to the list with a mail client - you can see the threads more clearly, it doesn't get mixed in with your other mail (or require you to set up filters), and the messages are there for you to browse when you want. Gmane is also an archive and doesn't delete messages (although it does label those likely to be spam so you can make your newsreader skip them). This is a 'pro' for most technical discussion lists but for more personal lists some think it a 'con'.

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New passes option
by Jonathan Osuch 10 Aug '04

10 Aug '04

Tim, I've incorporated a new passes option that plots the orbits and leaves them on the screen. It works for all escape time fractals. There are some backwards compatibility issues because the per_pixel routines for the mandel types do not currently initialize the y value, and need to. Also, the formula types appear to be plotting the orbits with the y-axis reversed. This feature works like the mandelcloud fractal type, which happens to be coded incorrectly. The magnitude is compared to 2, not 4. I don't plan on fixing it. Jonathan

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Allegro version now up-to-date
by Jonathan Osuch 01 Aug '04

01 Aug '04

Tim, I've brought the experimental Allegro port up to the current revision level. The Allegro portion of it works as well as it ever has. I've imported it into my CVS repository. Now, how can we make the CVS repository accessible to others? Jonathan

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Fractint vs XP, redux
by Edwin 01 Aug '04

01 Aug '04

I've read with some interest the discussions on the difficulty of getting the DOS version of Fractint running under Windows XP. While there are obviously solutions around using DOS, FreeDOS, bootable CDs, etc, I can't help thinking that the hassle involved in rebooting is too great for this to be viable. Long-term, some sort of rewrite to make Fractint more environment-neutral so it can have DOS, Windows, X11, etc, flavors built from a largely common code base, would seem to be ideal. But, as has also been pointed out numerous times, this would be a huge undertaking and no-one seems to have the time. I wonder if the more limited goal of getting Fractint and Windows to 'play nice' is more achievable? That is, keep the existing interface and make the minimal changes possible so Fractint will run under XP. It sounds like the major problem is graphics card support - are there any other major gotchas people know about? If that's the main problem, the simplest approach I can think of is: 1) Get Fractint compiling with a modern C compiler toolchain (eg Visual C++) to produce a Win32 executable. 2) Modify the display-driver code to use DirectX, so that Windows supplies the video-card handling. Otherwise leave as a full-screen, character-mode app. (This would of course be IFDEF'ed to leave the existing code intact). That still sounds like a lot of effort, but perhaps a bit more achievable than the 'major rewrite' approach. Does this sound interesting? Plausible? Can anyone think of anything simpler? Would it be simplest to start with the DOS code, or XFractint (or one of the other branches I've heard mentioned)? Regards, -- Edwin

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