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by IronBacon 870 days ago
I remember as a teen I did mine in 68000 assembly on a Commodore Amiga to get it reasonable fast considering it was running on a 16 MHz CPU — i would say a few seconds to draw the canonical image — but IIRC it reached pretty fast the limit of math precision.

At that time I didn't know what was a complex number, but was fascinated by the whole concept of fractals and how complex structures could be created with a relative simple program.
1 comments
Baeocystin 869 days ago
A few seconds? Wow! I did a science fair project on the Mandelbrot set using my Amiga 2000, and it took me a good 45+ minutes to generate a single 320x200 color image. IIRC, I wrote the generator in some variant of Pascal, and was so happy with the performance increase over Basic on my C=128...

I ran in to the precision limit pretty quickly, same as you. I didn't understand computers well enough to know that's what the problem was, and I remember spending hours pouring over my code, trying to figure out where the bug was. Good times. :D

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IronBacon 868 days ago
If I'm not confusing it with something else, I seem to recall that when zooming on the set the calculation was nearly instantaneous. As you said, good times! ^__^

I still have that A500 but who knows where I put those floppies, I'm tempted to turn it on but I'm scared the PSU will blow itself...

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snvzz 868 days ago
A500 PSUs (particularly the 2nd one) are the most reliable and powerful.

The A500 themselves are built like tanks. Chances are it just works.

But watch out for trapdoor expansion. Most likely has a varta barrel battery in it, which will eventually leak and damage the expansion, and possibly also the computer itself.

I would recommend opening that trapdoor and removing/inspecting anything installed there as soon as possible.

These barrel batteries are only used to keep RTC, and the board will be fine w/o.

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vardump 869 days ago
The difference is probably you used floats and he/she used fixed point (integers). Of course that way you do run out of precision very quickly.

Software emulated floats on Amiga 2000 were really, really slow.

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