I do have a question: Why do you change the formula name when it appears to be exactly like the previous one?? I would think this could end up making things confusing, not to mention a waste in storing them within a .FRM file.

Thats a good question that I never really talked about before. Fracton doesn't use a separate formula and parameter file. It has its own file format that has one file for one fractal. To be able to export par files for use with FractInt, it has to have some formula name in the par file. Even FractInt doesn't use the formula name when the formula and parameters are in the same file (I don't think). I could have used the same formula name over and over again and that seemed like a bad solution. So what I did was generate a name based on the time that the par file was generated. That way you will always have a unique name and there won't be name collisions between someone else's formulas and yours. The downside as you mentioned is that the same exact formula is sometimes used again with a different name. To be able to use the FractInt archives with .par collections and .frm collections in separate files I made a special command tool within Fracton that lets you select a .par collection and a .frm collection. It then makes a new set of files(one for each unique par) that combines one par and one formula in one file. That combined par file is the only kind that can be imported into Fracton. I should mention after recombining hundreds of par files from the archives that there are lots of name collision and missing formulas. Those fractals are probably lost forever. If they had been archived in the combined format, you would always have had the correct formula and par together. I am pretty sure I know why it was originally done that way. The computers of that time had very limited storage and anything that made files smaller was really important. I am still amazed at all the capability the original designers achieved with FractInt. -- Mike Frazier www.fracton.org