Rich wrote:
While I didn't want to rewrite the code base (I'm not -that- much of a masochist! :-), I did make a fairly extensive change with the driver layer :)
These changes could probably be backported into the main source tree. However there are some fractint features that are so closely coupled to video that they might pose a problem (e.g. orbits or inverse julia windows). I recall a story a while ago about an opinion of a fairly iconoclastic software mover and shaker (wish I could remember who it was) who said that legacy code should be treated with respect. It represents uncounted hours of development and debugging, and when people see its defects and bravely sugeest total rewrites, the effort is almost always under-estimated. The whole refinement effort has to be redone. On the other hand, whenever code is touched that area of code can be refactored. And one can make architectural changes - I've done it with fractint several times myself :-) Tim