Charles,
Where in a Fract???.gif file does the Fractint data appear? I have a question and want to be on sound ground before I raise it. All I can identify is that the file starts with GIF98a and near the end there is a little plain text that is "fractint001 Fractal" with the space actually being y with an umlaut over it. Nothing else identifiable as plain text. The point I particularly want to know about is how the V screen parameters are included.
It should be shortly after the GIF89a, as part of the standard GIF file format. You would need to look at the GIF specification. I don't believe we save any data from the <v> screen in the Fractint specific data segments. There is a very old DOS program called F-DATA by Marc Reinig, that can extract Fractint specific data from GIFs. It is not up-to-date so it won't see new parameters, but it is real good with the basics. I suspect if you would like to use it I'll have to email it to you, since a Google search didn't find it.
My Fractint computer had a disastrous breakdown a couple of months ago and am trying to recover and also evaluate ver 99. I ran across a floppy disk that was labeled "Problems" and am passing along one of them.
Here is my Newpar.par file which includes the formula. The original parameter file was run on Fractint 99 and then recorded again. It doesn't show as much of the problem that showed originally but as you zoom in amazing things happen. At some magnifications the apparent high count areas disappear and at other magnifications they are massively messed up.
These PARs need to have periodicity adjusted. Using either 0 or 10 will work. If that doesn't fix the problem you are seeing, let me know. Jonathan