
This is a Mandelbrot/Julia program for X-windows. I think
it might interest somebody because it is very fast and
it looks very nice, at least on color displays.

I originally thought I would post this to comp.sources.x but
the rules for posting were too strict ;)
No kidding, I am not going to construct an Imakefile nor
patchlevel.h because I do not know how to.

Secondly, this program will probably compile OK only on
Sun 3's, Sun sparcstations and IBM RS/6000's because those
are the only machines I have access to. I still do not
know how to make programs portable ;)

This program is designed under BSD unix, and there is at least
one BSD-specific select() call that you may need to modify if
porting to sysV environment. And I really do not know why
the includes have different names under differenct environments...
sys/termio.h? sys/termios.h? termios.h? what the heck, I'll
leave it up to you to figure it out ;)

Compiling instructions:
Sun3/sparc:	make "CC=gcc"  OR
                make

IBM RS/6000: make "CC=bsdcc"

It should not be too difficult in other environments either.

This will produce two programs, xmb and xnetmb;
they are essentially the same program but xnetmb can
distribute the calculations to other machines using
unix-style stream sockets. See the manual page for more details.

The speed of this program is for three reasons:
1) fixed point math when possible (first 16-bit, then 32-bit and
   doubles only as the last possibility)
2) contour crawling algorithm... follows the edges of different ares
   and thus reduces the number of pixels that must be calculated.
3) distributed calculation in an network, xnetmb only.

The first of these had to be done in somewhat unportable manner.
If your system has problems with signed bit-shifts
or 2's complement math, you may have to #undef USE_INTEGER_MATH
from mb.h.

One of the options is undocumented, namely "-guru fast" ;)
That is because it will increase the net traffic of xnetmb by over
100%, and it is not meant to be used lightly.
Normally xnetmb will use only about 100 K of net traffic for an 1000x1000
picture by 32767 color, pretty little, eh? ;)

I might as well advertise the "mandel" program which is a similar
mandelbrot program for Amiga... it too uses fixed-point math and
contour crawling. But do not contact me to get it!! It can probably
be found in abcfd20, but I do not remenber its name.. mandel.lzh?

Author: Hannu Helminen, Finland
Email: dm@stekt.oulu.fi
(or dm@otitsun.oulu.fi or dm@rainbow.oulu.fi)


