- Fractint
- Fractint is the Swiss knife of fractal hunters in the
PC universe. This is a freeware, i.e. a software with
reserved rights, but which can be freely distributed as long as no
commercial profit is made from it. It is available from many
places in the network. Ask for "Fractint" in Altavista or whatever
you prefer and you will be given a list of places from where to
download it; the
Spanky's
pages are a good entry point.
It
also exists on a few other operating systems (OS2, Unix,
Amiga), but still not for MacOS, as far as I know.
It can do nearly everything...
As an Amiga veteran passed to the Macintosh, I never played with it and
I am only repeating what I read here and there. By the years 93-94, the contents
were already impressive
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Mandelbrot Set, Julia Sets, Inverse Julias,
Newton domains of attraction, Complex Newton, Lambda Sets,
Mandellambda Sets, Circle, Plasma Clouds, Lambdafn, Mandelfn,
Barnsley Mandelbrot/Julia Sets, Barnsley IFS Fractals,
Sierpinski Gasket, Quartic Mandelbrot/Julia, Distance Estimator,
Pickover Mandelbrot/Julia Types, Pickover Popcorn, Peterson Variations,
Scott Taylor / Lee Skinner Variations, Kam Torus, Bifurcation,
Orbit Fractals, Lorenz Attractors, Rossler Attractors,
Henon Attractors, Pickover Attractors, Gingerbreadman,
Martin Attractors, Julibrots, Diffusion Limited Aggregation,
Magnetic Fractals, L-Systems, Lyapunov Fractals, fn-fn Fractals,
Halley, Dynamic System, Mandelcloud, Quaternion, HyperComplex,
Cellular Automata, Phoenix, Frothy Basins
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Undoubtly, the list is now even longer and, anyway, if you do
not find the mathematical function that you are looking for, you can
now code it directly!
In their time, the Amiga users would grumble that such
all-purpose software possibly did not achieve everything at the best, they
were skeptical about the speed of computations and
they were rather laughing at its ergonomics. But now the Amiga has
vanished, and even if Fractint is not far more friendly-user than
by the past, it has taken benefit of the incredible power rise of
MS-DOS machines. It is now the way to an astounding variety of pictures;
to be aware of this, go to the
Fractalus website and look at the
entries in the 1998 competition, in the "Fractint" category.
- Other PC software
- Other programs have developed for PC, specially to get 24-bit colour
pictures. The main titles can be found in the
Fractalus website; add the program
"Ultrafractal".
- Macintosh software
- A comprehensive compilation can be found in the website of
Glenn Elert, with many entries, but nothing
as powerful or versatile as Fractint. One may quote
XaoS and
Fractal Domains.
However, Fractint
might very well
run on Macintosh in a near future.
- Amiga software
- Would a collector or an archeologist be interested, I could propose
my own MandelTour, with which all the Mandelbrot pictures in
this website have been obtained. It specially offered a very easy
handling of colours, no equivalent of which I have found in more
recent programs. Theoretically, it could run on PC or Macintosh
provided that the corresponding
U.A.E. emulation is
installed, but I have no confirmation.
Art&Frontières was a commercial program for computing a few
variants of the Mandelbrot Set. Maybe it will be
rewritten for Windows95.
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