Hello Albrecht. Hello again, Tim. I'm sorry that it has taken me a while to post anything to these threads, but I have been a bit tied up. To Albrecht I would say that, like many others, I am a lurker. I have been subscribed to the Fractint list since 1991, and have followed it closely ever since. I have probably only posted four messages in over twenty years, although I have corresponded with Tim and Paul Lee. I no longer try to render new images and although, like Tim, I am retired, I am now greatly slowed down by visual impairment. I have no sight in one eye and not much in the other, and despite using a great program called ZoomText, it is painfully slow for me to type. I ought to get Dragon, but it is expensive. Anyway, I want you to know that I greatly enjoy your fractals, as I have for more than twenty years those from Jim Muth. I'm glad that you have decided to continue. Tim, you may not remember that I asked you to check an article I wrote in 1991 about fractals and Fractint. I wrote a monthly column for a PC magazine from July 1991 to August 1994. I gave up in the end because of the cavalier treatment of the editors, who cut text and images without consulting me and failed to return materials after publication including colour prints that I had had commercially copied at some expense. Anyway, you asked about the platform, graphics, and monitor that people use. My current PC runs Windows XP SP3 and was put together for me in December 2009. Its specs say 'VGA Onboard: Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500; on board graphics subsystem (VGA + DVI-D) - VGA Upgrade Path: 1x Pci-Express x16 Graphics Slot V2.0' I hope that means more to you than it does to me. The PC is currently hooked up to a Samsung SyncMaster 2243BVX monitor. Having said all that, it /won'/t run Fractint from DOS. If I have to, I run Fractint for Windows, which sometimes causes my PC to reboot. Usually I download Jim's images (which he seems to have stopped posting last week) or the high-res versions from Hal Lane (which also seem to have stopped). On my computer bench I also have my PC before last (assembled about 2006) which /will/ run Fractint from DOS. It also has 3.5" and 5.25" drives for reading legacy stuff. However until I get the KVM switch working again, I can't boot it up to check what is on it. I hope this helps. BTW, I got my partner a new PC last year and also a laptop which run Windows 7, which I can't stand. Tim, I hope that you find a way (bootable CD, USB drive or whatever) that makes it possible to run Fractint from DOS on a PC less than eight years old. My thanks to the Stone Soup group. Regards, Timothy Wegner wrote:
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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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