Tony,
Any tips as how to improve the processing & rendering speed of the Fractint's Video Disk Save Mode?
Make sure it is using either expanded or extended memory, instead of your hard disk. This requires setting the value in the properties/memory section of the shortcut (up to 65535 KB). That will let you generate an image about 8000x8000 in memory. A divide and conquer approach using this size of image would speed things up a bit. Using "Auto" is supposed to give you an unlimited amount of extended/expanded memory, but it doesn't on my machine (with 256 MB). Maybe the help message was written when 64 MB *was* an unlimited amount of memory. 8-))
Does the size of the video disk save affect the size of the video disk save cache buffer and the speed of rendering the pixels?
Not as far as I know.
Is there any way to increase the size of the Fractint of Disk Save Mode Cache buffer 64k???
Yes, and no. You would need to download the source and look in the diskvid.c file. Change the value of the cache size and recompile. Which won't work at present because we are using the medium memory model which limits the maximum size of a structure to 64 KB. It would work for Xfractint... I have no clue as to how this section of code works. I have managed to break it several time, however. This section of code is a bit delicate. You might have noticed that if you start the generation of your image over a couple of times, the cache actually gets smaller. I haven't been able to track this down.
Since RAM is cheap these days I'm running 768 Meg of Ram. Are there any improvements to the Dos config.sys and autoexec.bat and msdos.sys setting that might either enlarge or improve the Fractint rendering performance.
As stated above, increase the amount of available expanded or extended memory. If you run in DOS-mode it is possible that himem.sys and emm386.exe don't have the same limitation as the DOS box under Windows. It appears to me that Fractint can handle much larger amounts of expanded and extended memory than 65535 KB (look in memory.c and general.asm). Jonathan