Scorpio News |
October–December 1987 – Volume 1. Issue 4. |
Page 29 of 55 |
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A major advantage of this program is the way it successively refines the picture, starting with large blocks of colour, and reducing the size of the block. When you are exploring to find interesting areas, this is much better than waiting ages to see what appears on the screen.
The program is rather primitive in the way it fails completely to allow the user to choose an area while it’s running. Instead, you need to insert co-ordinates in the user input routine, and recompile. As they say in the text books, improvement of this part of the program is left as an exercise for the reader…
Even using the Belectra board, the program takes a long time. And as the size of block being drawn is reduced, the time for a scan of the screen actually quadruples. As a consequence, I have only once let a picture be completed, as yet. Before I carry out a long run like that again, I intend to write a couple of programs to load and save pictures. Using a simple form of data compression, a picture will fit into 32K, with a quarter of this space being redundant. I could take the compression more efficient but this would be a the expense of ease of writing the program
I would have suggested that this program would make a useful benchmark of processor performance, but having seen a Meiko Computing Surface produce a screen of Mandelbrot is about one second, I would have found this computer’s couple of hours too depressing.
I am told that the Scorpio sale was a great success, with the non-working items being particularly popular. This suggests to me that there must still be a lot of people around who do enjoy making their own machines, and making it work. Well, I have some bits equipment for sale too, some of them will need to go to enthusiasts. Or masochists, perhaps? I can be contacted on ____-______ if you want to buy any of this gear, and I might haggle a bit over some of the items.
Quite a list of bargains, I think you will agree. How any of you will be able to resist this amazing series of offers, I cannot image. You may suspect that I am trying to raise money for something, and if you do, you are right. More of this later, if time and the deadline permit…
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