Introduction

Fractal Forge was born the day I had to print several fractal images and some simple posters with an Epson Stylus color printer. Back then, I realized there was no true color fractal generator for MS-Windows in the shareware market, so I decided to program one myself. I called it UbiMandel (after my name), and I wrote it in Visual Basic 3. I did not optimize the first version's algorithm because I didn't need to. Once I bought Delphi, I wondered what * simple program I could do, so I began to code True Mandel, another fractal program. I started it in May 1995 and finished it the following October. I released it on the Internet as True Mandel 1.0 (trmand10.zip), which stands for True Color Mandelbrot Set Generator.

Later, I decided to migrate to the win32-bit world (NT and 95-98) using Delphi 2. Soon, there were two shareware versions of TrueMandel: 1.5 and 1.6. In 1999, I completely rewrote the program in Delphi 4, and changed its name to Fractal Forge because there were several applications with similar names already available.

Since version 2.4 I decided to make Fractal Forge open source, so I published it to http://sourceforge.net/projects/fractalforge. I have less and less time to improve Fractal Forge so I hope someone else can continue its growing.

Your feedback was--an still is--very appreciated... I have received dozens of letters, both email and on paper. Keep writing to me, and I will keep developing this program.

If you are the author of any shareware program, I'll be glad to exchange sources or user licenses. If you need the source code for improving the program, visit Fractal Forge's web site at SourceForge or contact me by email at uberto@ubiland.net.