This is just a preliminary report, but I think I have found a solution for running the DOS fractint that will work for a lot of people, and one that the Fractint team (such as it is) might be able to support. This makes it possible to run the DOS fractint on modern combuters.

The hardware requirements are:

1. Bios that permits booting from a USB drive

2. Graphics with decent VESA video mode support.

I bought a bunch of Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8 gb USB drives. These are physically almost too small, they are not much larger than the USB connector itself. I have seen some complaints that some software recognizes them as fixed drives and won't format them. This actually worked to my advantage, because the Award BIOS of my XP machine treated it as a hard drive and let me select the Cruzer Fit to boot from.

There's a terrific free tool called rufus available here:

http://rufus.akeo.ie/

that runs under Windows (in my case Windows 8.1 64 bit) and can format the USB drive to boot to DOS. I used FreeDOS, but you can use just about any DOS instead. I like using FreeDOS because the default installation seems to do what Fractint needs with extended memory etc. I will verify that this is right.

Then I dumped the entire fractint distribution on the USB, with the single difference that I used a fractint.cfg generated by makecfg.exe with the VESA modes for my XP machine.

When I ran Fractint, every VESA mode worked, even modes that exceeded the native resolution of my cheap secondary LCD monitor. The problems using higher resolution modes on the same computer under Windows XP vanished.

On a related note, I am thinking about putting up a wiki at fractint.net/.org. We could put up instructions like this, par files, images, etc. I wouldn't want to pre-empt others that have fractal sites, but the idea is just to provide more information that would help folks use this ancient DOS program.

I would like to hear from anyone else who has used a DOS-from-usb-drive environment to run Fractint. One could literally have a DOS fractint environment booting from on a machine with no hard drives.

Tim