I could have sworn I have asked this before, but I searched my fractint records and I can't find it. I my copious free time now that I am retired (hah! hah! hah!) I have spend a lot of time updating my computer lab. I tend to build computers, and leave them on my network until they die. My oldest is an XP machine which supports not only running Fractint directly (albeit with mediocre VESA support) but also my ancient Microsoft Fractint development environment, which I swear any day now I will investigate.

Here's my question. I think it would be useful for those folks who use Fractint semi-regularly to describe what platform they use. The OS and the Graphics are probably the two most important things to share . I short note describing those two items might suffice. In this note I am undoubtedly being too verbose.

Of course Fractint runs really well (if not fast) on DOSBox, particularly the svn builds that have terrific VERSA support. But I'm guessing regular Fractint users probably use an old machine.

My old machine runs Windows XP and uses motherboard graphics with Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS, which the vesainfo utility says has a 1600x1200x256 mode. I haven't experimented too much to see what actually works with Fractint, but I don't think I can actually use that mode in a regular DOS box. I have an MSI RS2600XT board that I believe I could but in the machine - that's ATI graphics. I'm actually more concerned to keep that box alive for the developer environment than graphics. I also have some SCIlab software that improves VESA support which I could also investigate.

My "hah! hah! above meant that in retirement I am having an absolute blast doing all kinds of things, and even though Fractint activities are on my lists of interests, I can't promise to devote much time to it. Life is way too full. But I might devote some time! :-)

Oh, one more thing, I have some Linux environments I have updated recently (Fedora and Linux Mint). I will try putting Xfractint on them, haven't done so yet.

Tim