New Features in 20.0

Version 20.0 is an update of Fractint based on the developer's version 19.61 patch 85. You can report problems at:

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/robin.b2/buglist.htm

• Major 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

  • 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.

  • 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

• 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 Orgfrm 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 Orgfrm compilation, see Other Fractal Products.

  • 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 Orgfrm 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.

For information on previous versions, see Revision History.

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