Posted By
Litwr
on 2021-12-14
03:16:56
|  Yet another Mandelbrot
I dare to inform the +4 fans that I have just released a new +4 application - Superfast Mandelbrot Generator. It uses flashing or quasi-interlacing to simulate 8 colors. Many thanks to Luca who added this application to our site database.
This application is multi-platform. The Amstrad CPC guys made a video for it almost instantly - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCm-6tUHJzM - they used two real CPCs for this (one did a very good music)! 
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-12-14
17:09:13
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
It's pretty cool!
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Posted By
MMS
on 2021-12-14
18:55:45
 | Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Thank you for the transformation to our beloved platform.
My technical mindset prefer the interlaced, my eyes prefer the flashing version
It is really super fast! I can say, it is at least as fast as my compiled Pascal code I mention below when run on a 486 DX33 with 32 iterations (certainly on my 486DLC2 it was much slower than this)
Just some notes:
I am addicted to fractals, my thesis was also about fractals. I made a fully window based fractal generator on PC with Turbo Pascal, probably it was the world's very first fully mouse contollable fractal generator (it knows Mandelbrot, Julia and Dragon curves) next to palette animation and a MOD music played in the background.
Too bad it sems to lost forever due to a damaged floppy disc.
This thesis made on fractal compression is referring at the end my 1996 thesis, and I can say ~20% of it is based on mine
http://messzejaro.atw.hu/oldpages/fractal.html
BTW fractal picture compression is very interesting: I could make smaller files than JPG, with less blockiness, and the decompression requires low CPU power (generating the picture's fractal file on the other hand very CPU intensive), and could be zoomed without blockiness (though it looks a little strange after some time).
It is told here, that Microsoft Encarta used fractal compressed images:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/sxt104/class/Fractals.html
Somehow it did not really get the momentum, to become really widespread. (.FIF is the extension of such pictures, really hard to get a viewer nowadays)
The CPUs getting much faster, the memory and HDD became bigger, the internet speed significantly increased, so there was no need to implement a much more complex new file format.
http://users.senet.com.au/~mjbone/Fractals.html
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Posted By
Mad
on 2021-12-15
13:13:30
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Awesome stuff. I remember a contest in the 64er magazine around 89 or something.. There where lots of entries. The fastest one there (if I remember right) needed around 11 to 21 minutes to render a fullscreen mandelbrot (not sure about iteration count). And that one used the disc drive too to do the computations.. Maybe I remember all that wrongly but I really got extremely impressed by the mandelbrot fractals at that time. Seeing this one here is a bit sureal then  , nice work!
btw.. I think maybe todays compression would use neural net stuff instead of fractals, which should be also pretty fast..
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Posted By
George
on 2022-07-09
15:06:16
 | Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Great work!
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Posted By
SVS
on 2022-07-12
14:00:19
 | Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Nice program Litwr!
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Posted By
Mad
on 2022-07-12
17:04:41
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Wow 1%.. Great achivement.. Optimizing tough stuff to the max! Congrats!
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2022-08-08
14:18:17
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
@Mad I could get this 1% because of help from siz and Csabo about registers 1A/1B.
EDIT. I have finally released an interactive version - Superfast_Mandelbrot_Generator - all files are bundled on a D64-image now.
I'm having difficulty identifying a video effect. How to call the effect when we change two colors to get a new color?
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2022-08-08
09:35:21
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Not sure if this is what you mean, but @Gaia just called it PAL color mixing?
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Posted By
Mad
on 2022-08-08
12:48:49
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
Maybe "interlace"... I know there was a big discussion about that topic here recently, about real interlace and so on, but on C64 and all other platforms, altering the color per frame was referred to as simply "interlace" too in the past (as far as I know), though it had nothing to do with resolutions and "PAL interlaced frames". Btw.. There was a big discussion about this PAL color mixing recently on forum64, I didn't knew that Gaia got it right in 2013 already! :)
Great that you are on improving that high spec fractal generator even more!
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2022-08-08
14:44:00
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
@Csabo It is not related to PAL. It is just an old idea to have more colors just mixing them. IMHO it is quite good for technical graphics like Mandelbrot pictures. For instance, the mixing of green and red shows yellowish.
@Mad Thank you. But it is not the real interlace.
It seems our effect list has still missed this effect.  I can suggest to call it just Doublescreen Color Mixing - we have to use twice as much video memory to show this effect.
EDIT. We also missed the PAL Color Inversion in our list.
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Posted By
Charles
on 2022-08-22
16:33:33
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
BTW, how much I was proud of my old Mandelbrot zoom part in "It's computer" demo. I think it still worth a look. My routine (lost in time) used both the +4 and 1541 CPU simultaneously Please don't judge it by the music, that was my first and last attempt to compose something
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Posted By
Luca
on 2022-08-23
02:04:26
 | Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
@Charles oh, I have no clue that there were codes taking advantage of the drive's CPU too on Plus/4. Now I see... There's also some text in the area $0400-$05ff! Fine first one, Charles!  Anyway, it seems to work on 1551 too, although the megademo clearly works on 1541 only since the loader at the beginning (possibly marking it as a 1541 only demo...?). Gonna add this note, we love to know about classic productions' particulars!
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Posted By
Charles
on 2022-08-23
12:30:30
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
@Luca, unfortunately that code was not saved with the demo part (that is just a 'slideshow' of the precalculated images), but +4 CPU was calculating colors from the top of the screen while the drive from the bottom Mandelbrot is a really good use example, relatively short code, lot of math but very little data to transfer. But I am pretty sure there are some other codes out in the wild utilizing the extra CPU power..
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2022-08-24
02:43:26
| Re: Yet another Mandelbrot
@Charles Sorry I missed this fine demo. So thank you very much for the link. Your Mandelbrot slide-show is very fast and impressive. The idea to use the drive CPU looks fantastic for me. Maybe I should try one day to implement Hyper-Fast-Mandelbrot-Generator based on it. This can allow the +4 be faster than the BBC Micro or any other 8-bit computer! And, I like your music, it has something special and original in it.
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