I share an idea I had years ago ... Intel used to make a 20MHz 286 chip. (I remember using a Dell laptop that had it, 27 years ago.) With today's technology, you could put that same chip, PLUS a number of megabytes of extended memory, PLUS DOS with Fractint installed - all on a single chip. With EVERYTHING running at chip speed (no waiting for slow RAM), I'd think it would be just about the fastest native code Fractint fractal generator around. Could even fit in a box small enough to fit in your pocket, even with mouse/keyboard/video ports. On 12/30/2014 10:51 AM, David W Riccio wrote:

I love the disk mode

I have been using it to make 4Kx4K images for a long time.

In the pure DOS environment it speeds things up to make a RAM disk and a bat file to transfer the Fractint software to the RAM drive and run Fractint on that RAM disk. (since the Disk Video uses disk reads and writes to build the image)

On 12/30/2014 11:13 AM, Bill Jemison wrote:

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Thanks for reminding me of disk video mode! As I am trying to get the time and energy to do more audio fractal explorations it may have saved me some rediscovering. Since the visual part of the fractal is of little or no interest/use to me in producing audio fractals, I would often use disk video mode to listen to the sounds while in a dos box. I could control my sound card and recording modes quite easily within windows, and when necessary get back into the fractint window to adjust parameters within fractint. While the speed of disk video may be of great use for most, it is irrelevant to me...I always use orbit delay - often with values of 1000 or more.

Bill Jemison https://sites.google.com/site/audiofractals/

On 12/30/2014 12:14 PM, Paul N. Lee wrote:

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Lloyd Garrick (JackOfTradeZ) wrote:

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Does anyone have experience or ever use the "Disk Video" mode? ........ I CAN'T BELIEVE I just discover this after using FractInt almost 20 years now !!

I have for many years now!!!

I use it when I have to, for machines that will not display FractInt correctly, or when needing specialized video modes (especially large resolutions). Usually works quite well, and somewhat faster.

Just prefer seeing the generated images more. :-)

Sincerely, P.N.L.

-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com

You can run DOS, FreeDOS, and most versions of Windows in a virtual environment The two that I like are Oracle's VirtualBox (it runs under another operating system ... like Win7 or Linux) and will let you create and run many copies of a virtual machine (up to the limits of your hardware) I have also been using XenServer (Also open source from Citrix) ... it is a virtual hypervisor that runs bare to the metal and will support a very rich and complex mix of other OSs running under it. I have an old 8GB Dual 4core Xeon server I converted to a XenServer You can allocate processors and memory to virtual machines in any of these environments and run many copies of Fractint at a time. I like the XenServer since I can run a remote console from another machine to see how things are running and because of the low overhead of the hypervisor. On 1/3/2015 12:11 PM, david wrote:

On 12/30/2014 08:40 AM, JackOfTradeZ@comcast.net wrote:

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. Does anyone have experience or ever use the "Disk Video" mode? I am currently rendering an animation based on 8th order Julia set; it is "circular" and I wanted a "square" video screen, like 1024x1024 or such. I could find none in the usual *.cfg files. But I retrieved the "big" file from the FractInt distribution zip, and it has a 2048x2048 mode, which is good [large high resolution - what I want], but it is a "disk-video" mode only. I gave it a try and it is FAST !!! Only thing is you can't see the image rendering, just a screen with some information updating. Small sacrifice. And it runs in windows !!! [XP and 2K]. And it can be a "window", not full screen; I just see the GIF files being created in the directory one by one. I can multitask also while it is running, although performance sometimes choppy. All I do is double click my BAT file and let it rip - awesome!! I CAN'T BELIEVE I just discover this after using FractInt almost 20 years now !!

Fractint is rich with features, one reason why it's still my choice despite the competition.

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It doesn't appear to use the video adapter [graphics card, hardware] directly, just CPU rendering. I let it run for several hours and noted no significant temperature increase either on CPU, chipset, or NVidia card with my hardware monitor.

The thought just occurred to me that maybe you could run multiple Fractint disk-video sessions, and if your OS is smart of allocating CPU cores, each session could be running on its own core. So today's multicore CPUs could really blast through generating multiple fractals.

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Merry Christmas, Happy HoliDaZe, and a Fractal New Year everyone! JoTz

happymerrynewchristmasyear!

-- -David "The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?" - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)