A Fractal Journey into Outer Space created by Magical Science Congratulations, you are now the proud owner of this fractal creation and animation program called 'A Fractal Journey into Outer Space'. This program will enable you to create those mathematical pictures called Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. The program is very fast and only requires a couple of seconds to create a standard full screen fractal. You may also create some nice animations which uses real time unpacking, this provides space for more frames in memory than usual. Some other nice features are the real-time scrolling and the possibility of making 24-bit colour pictures (.RAW) for use with Photochrome. Loading Just load it and press space after the yellow flash on the credits screen. Help screen If you press 'h' you will enter a help screen, that way you don't have to remember what all the key are good for. Great isn't it. Zoom and real-time scrolling To zoom in press and the program will automatically zoom in on the middle of the screen. To zoom out press . To scroll the picture use the arrow keys. For fast zoom and scrolling use few iterations. Number of iterations If you want a more detailed picture, then you may increase the maximum number of iteration. Remember that increasing the number of iterations will make zooming, scrolling slower and when creating a .RAW picture the number of colours used will be one more than the maximum number of iterations. The keys for changing #iterations are: 1 16 iterations 2 22 iterations 3 32 iterations 4 42 iterations 5 52 iterations 9 100 iterations 0 150 iterations 5 iterations 7 iterations The last two are great if you want to zoom fast or make a really huge animation. Different type of fractals To switch between different types of fractals use these keys: F1 Standard Mandelbrot F2-F6 Different Julias Making 24-bit colour (.RAW) fractal If you want a fractal with more than 16 colours you may make a really colourful one with this option. To make a .RAW fractal press and you will see this alternative in the menu. There will be a different colour for each one of the iterations plus one for black, unless you choose to make a picture in greyscales. These pictures take an age to make as they have to recalculated onto the disk (they wont fit in memory), but they really look great. Animation How to make an animation. 1. Select start frame by pressing 's'. 2. Zoom and scroll a while and when you have found a nice last frame press 'f'. 3. Choose the number of frames you want in between by pressing one of the following keys and the computer will start calculating your animation. Numeric keyboard 1 5 frames 2 10 frames 3 15 frames 4 20 frames 6 30 frames 8 40 frames If you want to include the current picture in your animation then press '0' on the numeric keyboard and it will be inserted last in your animation. Pressing will delete the last frame and pressing 'a' will show your animation. When making an animation, make it move fast and don't zoom to deep. If you don't make this rounding errors may occur. If you are interested I use 13 decimal bits, 2 integer ones and one bit for the sign. All frames in the animation are held packed in memory and will be unpacked in real time when showing the animation. Palette Press for a random palette. Load/Save Press return to enter the floppy stuff screen. Only screens saved as .FRS (FRactalScreen) may be loaded into the program, because only these have the coordinates saved. The .FRS and .FRA (FRactalAnimation) files are compressed and also contains the palette. General info This program is public domain and I hope you have fun using it. If you have some suggestions or if you (dis)liked the program or perhaps found a bug, then please write me a letter. If I hear from you I might include your suggestions in a later program, what about using the blitter for scrolling or a Falcon version. I'm not paranoid about the source code which is written using Devpac 2.If you want it, please send me a disk with something nice on it and I will send you the source code. Johan Karlsson Magistarsv. 55 X112 226 44 Lund Sweden E-mail d92jk@efd.lth.se (Computer science, Lund University)