One of my favourite programs in my old computer (Win95) was Fractint, a
wonderful piece of software for creating and manipulating fractals, which
runs in dos.
Now, on my new computer with XP pro, 256 Mb RAM, Celeron2000, I can no
longer run it.
Well, that's not quite true. The program will run, but despite trying the
numerous different display resolutions it offers (SF6 is the one I used to
use), the monitor goes thru the motions of drawing the fractals, but only
nonsense graphics slowly appear, rather as if it has run short of memory.
I can still run Fractint perfectly by booting from a dos floppy, but, being
a lazy individual, I was hoping that someone might have found a way to
run it in XP, or maybe there's a later Windows version available. There's
nothing relevant on the Fractint site, which sadly doesn't seem to have
been updated for a long time.
Fractint was developed, I think, in the mid-to-late 1980's, but is still a
program of immense power and incredible complexity. I would have thought
that too much development work would have gone into it for it to have been
abandoned.
Running it in W95/98 compatibility mode doesn't help.
Are there any Fractint enthusiasts out there?
Maybe I'm overly optimistic in thinking that a program this old has any
hope of running with all this fancy new stuff.
I know that there are numerous other fractal-generating programs
available. I've tried several, but never found anything that comes
anywhere near Fractint for its immense depth, versatility and ease of use.
Don Penlington
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