Just downloaded it again and tried it again. Here's what happens: For a few seconds, I see a menu, I think of 3 or 4 items? Doesn't stay up long enough for me to read or pick anything from it. Then it goes to the bad or missing command interpreter message, and the VM hangs. Tried again. By hitting a cursor key, I got to select menu item 1 (the JEMEX one?). That gives me the bad or missing command interpreter message. Picking option #2 got me to a DOS prompt. CDed to fractint and started Fractint. Let it render a mandelambda at 1280x1024x256 and zoomed in. Then, while it was rendering, I switched away using Ctrl-1 (to switch to my primary XFCE desktop, I was running it on my 3rd desktop) and the Fractint window turned into a blank "text size" window that didn't respond to keyboard or mouse input. Had to kill it from the VM manager. (The 1280x1024 mode is the Chips & Tech one, maybe it doesn't get along with the virtual video card.) If the Fractint window isn't active when I use Ctrl-1, everything is fine. So I guess it goes back to the keymapper ... So: menu option 1 doesn't work at all for me. #2 and 3 work. #4 works but attempting to zoom using the mouse gets not response, it doesn't include the mouse driver. After it got working, I tweaked the appliance settings. I loathe and don't use PulseAudio, so I switched the audio to use ALSA. I may disable audio support since I don't use it in Fractint, anyway. Is there a reason why you give the VM 32MB of memory? That seems to be way beyond what any version of DOS ever supported. Suggestion re the menu: can you make it stop there so the user has to pick something? Or stop there longer? It seems to only wait a second or two on this 2.4GHz i7 laptop here. My old DOS days are long ago or I'd poke around in AUTOEXEC.BAT, where I guess it's happening? I have LinuxMint17 Cinnamon running on a VM here, but I'm also using the XFCE desktop there, not Cinnamon. Thanks for the appliance, now just need to figure out how to get a 1920x1080x256 display mode that isn't distorted. On 02/02/2015 04:38 PM, David W Riccio LCD wrote:
I just downloaded the virtual machine .ova from the Fractint.org site and installed on that same version of VirtualBox as you are using (on a Windows 7 machine) and I also have it running on a Mint17 box too. No problems with either version of the host machine.
I do have a newer version that I am testing with a patched version of Freedos 1.1 (to fix networking issues / allow SAMBA access to the host) and Fractint 20.04p12 version. When I am happy with the testing I will send Tim Wegner an updated version to post to the Fractint.org site.
Mint17 is a 64 bit Debian version so I am surprised at your problem ... you might try and get a fresh copy of the .ova and try again to install.
On 1/31/2015 10:52 PM, david wrote:
On 01/31/2015 05:46 PM, David W Riccio LCD wrote:
I have been using Fractint (on a virtual machine running under Oracle Virtual Box) on both Windows 7 and Linux (Mint 17 and Ubuntu) This environment supports many of the graphics modes, including 1024x768x256 VESA There is a per-configured virtual machine on the www.fractint.org site. (FreeDOS with Fractint pre built)
It has been tested on a number of VM Hosts
Fails on my system: 64-bit Debian Sid Linux, Oracle VirtualBox 4.3.18_debian r96516, running on 2.4GHz Intel i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB HD, Intel HD4600 integrated graphics. The machine boots, then reports a bad or missing command interpreter (C:\FDOS\BIN\COMMAND.COM C:\FDOS\BIN /E:1024 /P=C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT). Then it prompts me to enter the "full shell command line" but doesn't respond to the keyboard, so I have to close it.
I grabbed that one on 12/10/2014. Is there an updated version?
Windows XP runs fine on a VM under the same version of VirtualBox. Haven't tried running Fractint under a Windows XP VM yet. Probably would take a good performance hit.
I grabbed an SVN DOSBox (supposedly has support for additional graphics modes) and it runs DOS Fractint at 1280x1024x256 here. Mouse interaction is a little flakey, and just now it froze up and required me to kill the dosbox process from a root terminal.
On a multi core CPU you can dedicate a processor to the DOS virtual machine, you can even run multiple copies of the machine so you can work on more that one image at a time. I have run 6 copies on a Dual 4core Xeon machine under Linux.
The virtual machine should also run an any Intel Based Mac (OS X + Virtual Box) but I have not tested it under that environment. If anyone has, please post results to this email server.
I have also setup a bootable flash / jump drive with FreeDOS and Fractint installed on it. If your machine will boot to a USB drive you are up and running and have the added benefit that you can keep your normal OS on your hard drive untouched ... If you boot to your normal OS you can move the files from the USB to your hard drive, etc. (this is an advantage over the virtual machine which is a bit harder to move your files to the outside environment)
Not much harder. You add a MOUNT command to the AUTOEXEC.BAT, IIRC, and mount your normal home folder (/home/username) as a drive. Or you just mount whatever folder you want to keep fractals in. I'm weird, I use drive Q. Then you can copy files back and forth with normal DOS commands.
The down side is that you may not have all the video modes available depending on you graphics hardware.
That's unfortunately true. How much VESA support is there in modern video cards? I know a lot of them are pretty much Windows DirectX only for anything beyond very basic resolutions.
On 1/30/2015 10:32 AM, Knute Myhrvold wrote:
I haven't been able to use Fractint since back when I had Win98 & NT; it won't run on my WinXP-MediaEd now (Intel machine), though I understand XP may work with Fractint on an AMD machine.
My question is this: Which OS does Fractint "like" the best... Which OS will it run the best on??? [Unless Fractint runs much, much better on DOS (MS-DOS, FreeDOS, etc.), I would really prefer an OS with a GUI... for my sake.]
So, what do you think?: Win98; Win98SE; ME; NT3-4; 2000(NT5.0); WinXP-Media-Pro-SP3; 7... ? 32-bit?
I've just ordered an old AMD PC just for Fractint (Dell OptiPlex 740 Athlon 64 X2 4600+ 2.4GHz 1GB 80GB CDRW/DVD XP Professional Desktop) ... I don't know the Video card yet. There's a chance Fractint may work on this AMD with WinXP Pro, but what do you think would be the best OS for Fractint on this machine?
Thanks much for your suggestions!! ...Knute
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