Somewhere in my collection, I think I have an OpenDOS install disk image. I wonder how fast Fractint would run under that installed on bare hardware? Last OS I used before Linux was OS/2 Warp. It ran Fractint very well in a window on the OS/2 Workplace Shell. On November 28, 2020 4:47:47 PM HST, Timothy Wegner <tim@tswegner.net> wrote:
On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 5:01 PM <westwind@windfromwest.com> wrote:
I recently got back into Fractint because it does some fractals that no one else does. I had an old Win7 box that I had retired, brought it back to life, installed the XP that runs under Win7 and it cranks out Fractint just fine.
I tried a DOS emulator under Win X, but it was gruesomely slow. Not only did it emulate the old system, it ran it as slowly as it ran on old boxes! I will try the DOSBox-X to see how fast it does run.
You piqued my interest. I also have an old slower machine that runs XP that runs Fractint natively, and it ran the default 1600x1200x256 Mandelbrot in 8.5 seconds, compared to 64 seconds under DOSBox. So the DOSBox scheme is not for serious fractal artists like yourself who want to crank out many high rez fractals.
Then it dawned on me that DOSBox is meant for games, that in many cases need to be speed limited. In just a few minutes I was able to speed up the 1600x1200 fractal by 60 times. Go to the DOSBox-X CPU menu, and click "edit cycles" and set it to a really big number like 500000. This reduced the generation time from over a minute to .4 seconds.
I challenge folks here to come up with an optimized run-as-fast-as-possibleDOSBox setting for Fractint.
--- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com Sent from my Android device with F/LOSS K-9 Mail.