🚀 go-pugleaf

bert.tyler@satalink.com (Bert Tyler) writes:

>If you zoom beyond the limits of Fractint's integer math algorithms, Fractint
>quietly switches over to floating-point math.  Its precision limits
>are essentially those of the Intel architecture at that point, and are
>based on its ability to store the coordinates of successive pixels (in
>'double' format) using different values.  (I'm on vacation and checking my
>mail on a laptop that doesn't have a "C" compiler, so I can't dig
>up the exact limit at the moment.)  To get around that limit,
>you would have to rewrite Fractint (including its asembler routines)
>using an alternate format - or use an Xfract port on a machine which has
>more significant digits in its floating-point format.  The latter is probably
>*far* easier.

The machine is the machine.  So I guess I will be doing some assembly.
Now is the source to fractint itself available?  I doubt if I want to
modify fractint, though I might want to "borrow" some of the video mode
code for VGAs I don't have to get a start on them.  Otherwise I will
just use the standard and VESA 16 and 256 color modes only.

I'd rather have more precision in integer anyway, especially since my
machine is a 486SX.  Maybe this would be a good reason to go ahead and
port GMP to MS-DOS.  But then again, multi-precision integers are not
that hard to code.


>PH>I also find a limit of 1000 on iterations to be rather small.

>I'm confused - Fractint's current iteration limit is 32,768 (it would have
>been 65536 had I not been stupid enough to use signed integers for a field
>that never goes negative - maybe we'll fix that someday).

I'm confused.  It doesn't go above 1000.  I just grabbed a new one about
3 days ago.

Since you said "I", I take it you are the author.  Where does the OFFICIAL
release get put up for ftp access?  I must have an old version or something.
Since the file names on ftp site very rarely give the version, I have no
clue as to which sites are up to date and which sites have just copied the
file without preserving the date.  I list the sites from archie and then
just pick the largest one that has the most recent date and on my own
continent if possible.
-- 
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| Phil Howard,  pdh@netcom.com,  KA9WGN    Spell protection?  "1(911)A1" |
| "It's not broken... it's just functionally challenged" --Phil and Pete |
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