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Atari Mega Archive 1
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Atari Mega Archive - Volume 1.iso
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fractint.arc
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README
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1990-07-12
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July 12, 1990
Howdy Folks...
This is what you might call a pre-pre-Alpha release of
Fractint 12 for the Atari ST. Due to circumstances beyond my
control, it's going to be a few weeks before I get a chance to
finish all the work that remains to be done. I'm just putting
this up now because a few people have asked to see the current
program, regardless of its incomplete state...
First off - most of the fractal types actually work,
correctly even. The exception is any type that says "complex"
in the name. The complex math routines are still giving me some
hassles... So, a list of don'ts:
Don't try the complex fractal types
Don't try to save the screen
Don't try to restore a screen
Don't try to print the screen
All of the above are almost guaranteed to crash/lockup
your ST, if not blow it up. ( }-) )
Some other interesting misfeatures... On the zoombox,
only the horizontal lines are drawn. (Don't ask me, I'm still
trying to figure it out. Stupid LineA docs...) The mouse isn't
supported yet, you'll have to use the cursor keys. The color
cycling code doesn't do anything. In fact, none of the palette
setting code does anything, you're stuck with the colors I set
up when I last compiled the thing.
I'm not including the Fractint 12 doc file. The stuff
that works is simple enough to deal with without the docs. If
you think you need the docs for something, it most likely isn't
implemented yet.
I've left the symbol table intact on this copy of the
program. If you want to play with the color setup, you can
tweak the values in the array at "_grafpal" wherever it lives.
This is actually two arrays back-to-back, the symbol names get
truncated to fit in 8 characters. The first array is the fore-
ground palette in the flicker modes, and the second is the
background palette. If you're not interested in using a debugger
to tweak the colors in hexadecimal, then you can just forget
you read this paragraph.
The program will work with any resolution, and also
works with overscan. Note that it only works with the version
of overscan.prg also included in this archive. (This is a copy
of Overscan 1.60 that I tweaked. The original doesn't reset
the LineA screen parameters when you do a Setscreen, this one
does. You need it if you have overscan and want to toggle low
and medium rez.)
As a point of trivia - I wrote my own pixel set/get
routines, because using LineA was too slow, particularly with
the flicker modes. They work fine with my mono & color setups,
with or without overscan. If you've got some exotic display
type that they don't work with, let me know. And trivia for
overscan users - don't use physbase emulation, or fractint
won't be able to get the right dimensions for allocating new
screens.
Rambe ramble ramble... Well, what'd you expect for a
doc written at 5:30 am. Sigh. I guess I'd have gotten this
program done sooner if I didn't stop and play with it every
time I implemented another feature. So it goes... I think it's
fun, hope you enjoy it. It'll be finished, sometime.
-- Howard Chu
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu