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News |
28 November 2020 - Released DOSBox/Fractint package to allow running on Windows ftp/current/DOSBox.
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Mirrors |
Tim Wegner maintains a mirror at https://fractint.org/
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What is Fractint? |
Fractint is a freeware fractal generator created for IBMPC's and compatible computers to run under DOS and ported to Linux. You can run the DOS Fractint program under a modern version of Window using DOSBox. This page is for anyone who wishes to keep up with the latest source changes and who would like to try the current developer's version.
Bert Tyler has supplied this about the origins of Fractint:
Sometime in the spring of 1988 Bert Tyler bought a brand-new IBM PS/2 386/16. As an experiment he downloaded and ran a simple Mandelbrot-display program for it - and watched in horror as it took the program two hours to generate half of the initial image. In those days a Floating Point math unit was an expensive option on 386-based PCs, and Bert's PC didn't have one.
Bert recalled that Dave Warker, one of his coworkers at the time, had built a demo Mandelbrot-generation program for TI graphics card he was working with using integer math, so Bert tried that approach. In September of 1988 Bert uploaded the results (full source and "documentation" included) to Byte Magazine's online public storage area as a 20K FRACT386.ARC file. It was a simple program: to get it to generate a portion of the Mandelbrot set one had to enter the coordinates of the section one wanted on the commandline. A month later, Bert released version 2.0 (with zoom and pan!). Two months later version 2.1 was released, this time to both Byte's online site and Compuserve's. A month later, version 3.1 included Julia sets. Then in December Mike Kaufman sent Bert an update he'd made to FRACT386 that gave it mouse support. Bert decided to give Mike full credit for his accomplishment and released that new code as part of version 4.0 - and the concept of Fractint and the Stone Soup Group was born. Soon after Bert attracted more collaborators and they set up shop in the Compuserve GRAPHDEV forum.
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The Fractint User Web Pages |
The latest offical release is available here: dos and linux. However, at this point the pace of development is so deliberate that the latest development patch is as stable (or maybe more stable, since known bugs get fixed) than the "official" release, so you might just as well get the developer versions below.
Two active fractint mailing lists can be found here:
Fractint Users and Fractint Developers
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Latest Developer Version Source Patches and Executable |
The latest developer version files can be obtained in this directory. We have divided the packages into separate dos and linux subdirectories. These files include the current release version, current source, and the current Xfractint source. We no longer create diff files corresponding to official patches. You can also access the code directly from the subversion repository at https://svn.fractint.net. This URL has a rudimentary web interface; if you really want to see the source, it is best to use a Subversion client (svn for Linux or TortoiseSVN for Windows) and download a working copy.
If all you want is the executable package of the developer's version, download the file fradev.zip. Changes in the main dos version since the last official release are listed in whatsnew.txt.
You will find some experimental, pre-alpha code here . Currently this includes Jonathan Osuch's Linux/Allegro port. This is in source code form which requires a development environment as well as a Red Hat RPM package.
We have started a virtual environments directory for virtual machines and bootable usb drive images.
Recent modifications: