Version 20 (9/99) New features include:
The new Fractal Evolver by Robin Bussell. This feature randomly perturbs
fractal parameters in a user-controlled way, letting you see a screen
full of postage-stamp variations of a fractal. See Parameter
explorer/evolver (p. 98)
New sound routines from Robin Bussell. Now <ctrl-f> brings up a menu
for changing the sounds made by Fractint. The sound= prompt can now
look like this: sound=off|beep|x|y|z/pc|fm/quant. See Sound Parameters
(p. 137)
New 32767 x 32767 (32K) pixel limit. Removed the 2048 pixel limit for
the size of fractals. You can now define disk video modes larger than
2048 x 2048.
Added the experimental synchronous orbits (a.k.a. SOI) "fractal
witchcraft" algorithm invoked using passes=s. This algorithm optimizes
the computation of very deeply zoomed fractals by calculating parallel
orbits, and subdividing when the orbits break formation. See Drawing
Method (p. 86)
Other new features and changes include:
When resuming in pass=1, the calculation is now restarted at the last X
value, instead of at the beginning of the row.
Fixed browser so browsing images won't make the current image non-
resumable.
During an image save to disk, the 's' key is now ignored.
Added Humberto Baptista's Epsilon Cross variation. It is triggered with
a negative proximity. With a positive proximity value, the result
should be backwards compatable. This assumes no one has made images
with a negative proximity.
Changed the internal orbitdelay timer to use a new microsecond timer.
Changed the logic for controlling sound and orbit speed to make it
less machine dependent. Use debug=4020 to invoke the old timing logic.
Modified autologmap so that it ignores symmetry.
Made the sound= prompts and batch output match the docs.
Made the colors= information put into PARs the last item in the PAR.
Added capability for makepar command to detect viewwindows and add to
PAR file.
Turned off view windows when the window is either too large or too
small.
Added an auto calc feature for the final aspect ratio if it is set to
zero and the x and y sizes are specified.
Fixed corners drift of integer fractals by disabling the logic that
attempts to keep the aspect fixed when zooming.
The <g> command no longer runs the backwards() routines unless debug=98.
Added tangent domain protection to integer version of popcorn that
prevents the "PI box" artifact. Brutal but works.
Generalized popcorn and popcornjul. There's a lot of possibility in
these new variations. The function variables are remembered as long as
you stay within the popcorn family, otherwise they are set to
defaults. The integer version has an artifact in the F3 mode, probably
due to tan() being undefined.
Included contributions from Humberto Baptista. These include Pickover's
Latoocarfian fractal type, as well as a passes=d[iffusion] option.
The parser colors variable is now initialized to 256.
Fixed problem with the floating point Unity fractal type.
Added Chuck Ebbert's parser speedup.
Added checks for inside, outside, biomorph, and fillcolor entries larger
than the number of colors.
Added fix so that showorbit= can be turned off by restarting Fractint
with <INS>.
Adapted the browser so it would work with arbitrary precision images.
Added cpu/fpu detection for 486 and up.
Fixed the slow down of palette reset caused by slowing down color
cycling.
Fixed inside=zmag and =fmod for arbitrary precision.
More mandel/julia FPU speedup by assembling the > 8087 code without the
emulator fixups. This was also used to speedup the FPU parser code.
The mandel/julia optimizations are a combination of contributions from
Rees Acheson (author of MANDELB), Damien Jones, Agner Fog, Terje
Mathisen, Thomas Jentzsch, and Daniele Paccaloni. Although it would
be hard to identify any one person's contribution, they all played a
great part in the pentium optimizations.
Added inside=fmod and inside=atan. The inside=atan option should only be
used with periodicity=0.
Fixed a bug in loaddac() routine caused because bios doesn't zero top 8
entries when resetting the dac.
Added two new features to <b> command. You can now specify "only" at the
"Record colors?", and added a maxlinelen field to specify how wide
the parameter file can be.
Added support for maps to makepar command. Try something like:
fractint map=lyapunov makepar=mymaps
Improved color map compression in PAR files. Debug=910 uses old method,
otherwise uses Sylvie Gallet's fix. Debug=920 uses lossless
compression for critical use.
Removed a longstanding but unintended row limit of the encoder which
resulted in an "interrupted" message when saving long (> 5000 rows)
files.
Fixed bug with LodRealPwr in formula parser.
Speedkey now works with unsorted lists.
Numbers in sound001.txt file names now increment.
Added new based data type PFCODE which is a pointer to FCODE. This saves
memory with the array of parser error messages.
Fixed bug that caused lockup when extended memory is used without any
expanded memory.
Fixed a bug in the spacing of file names in the file selection menu.
Added Rich Thomson's Xfractint fixes for Silicon Graphics.
Fixed Julia pointer bug.
Fixed a bug that caused the zoom box coordinates to be used if a doodad
was changed with a zoom box on the screen.
Formula type and inversion now work with large images. Fractint now does
everything simplgifd does - make an appropriate diskvideo mode, then
load and save a MIG!!
Fixed a long standing bug in the popcorn fractal type and added
backwards compatibility. Revised the popcorn type docs to clarify
that when the view window is used, it is possible to see orbits
outside the "box".
Fixed a bug that was causing garbage to be read when a non-Fractint GIF
image was read.
Replaced the lzw logic with code based on the UNIX compress. This should
eliminate very rare but very frustrating encoder problems.
Added a function one() to formula parser, to complement ident() and
zero(). The new function returns (1,0), and, like ident() and zero(),
is only available as a choice for fn1, fn2, fn3 or fn4.
Disabled symmetry for synchronous orbits.
Moved encoder default color palettes from near memory to overlayed data.
Changed the grid lookups to a function. Fixed diskvideo viewwindows bug.
Moved zoom box function out of assembler to c.
Changed the direction of single color cycling when in color cycling
mode.
Added command line option orgfrmdir=[directory path]. When used,
Fractint's search for formulas will make a final check of the
appropriate Orgform compilation file in the specified directory (e.g.
for a formula with the name "abc", the only file searched in the
specified directory will be _a.frm). This feature will significantly
reduce the time taken to find a formula for users of the compilation.
For more about the Orgform compilation, see Other Fractal Products
(p. 199).
Added a new minstack=<nnnn> command. Default value is 1100. This is the
minimum number of bytes returned by the stackavail() function required
in order to do another SOI recursion. People who get bad SOI results
at high resolutions should increase this value until the symptoms go
away.
Fixed the FPUatan bug that has been in the code in calmanfp.asm since it
was written. It turns out that the major problem was that the FPU
stack was being overrun.
Rewrote the Mandelbrot FPU code. Fixed the FPU versions of inside=
real, imag, mult, and summ. Incremented the version number so the fix
could be backwards compatible.
Added symmetry to Escher-Julia type.
Editpal changes from Andrew McCarthy. Removed IIT coprocessor support.
Parser changes: New code is only used to determine which functions and
variables will appear at top of "z" screen for a formula. Variable
names in fomrulas must now start with a letter or "_". Error checking
of formulas expanded. Formulas in Orgform compilation caught by the
new error checking have been rewritten.
Fixed bug which appeared when an image entry and a formula in a .par
file had the same name.
Added support for formula type to SPACE Mandelbrot/Julia toggle.
Implemented using new ismand parser constant.
Added incremental redraw of images when maxiter is increased. This
works on completed images that use inside=color. None of the other
inside= options are supported.