Draw a mandelbrot set on Atari Falcon. It renders significantly faster than the version that I wrote in GFA BASIC when I was 17.
Right now, it only runs on 68040 and above (which thankfully Hatari can emulate) in order to use the internal FPU. This enables it to render a Mandelbrot set full-screen in VGA highcolour mode approximately 8.5 seconds. It might be possible to shave a bit of time off that but I'm not hopeful of shaving much off it.
Runs full-screen in Falcon highcolor mode.
| Key | |
|---|---|
| z | zoom in |
| x | zoom out |
| ⇧ | up |
| ⇩ | down |
| ⇦ | left |
| ⇨ | right |
- Try fixed-point maths in order to get it working on a machine without an FPU. Apparently 68020 and above have 32 bit multiply instructions that might make it bearable to implement this. I'm thinking you'd only need 2 bits before the binary point (because if |k| > 2 then k is definitely not in the Mandelbrot set) so you could actually get a little bit more precision than a single-precision float. But I bet it's a pain to code and I bet it ends up performing worse than the 68040's FPU.
- Make it run in a GEM window (and thus make it run on FreeMiNT in Aranym).
- Optimise the Mandelbrot::calculate method - implement it in asm? Maaaybe... But TBH I think the compiler has already done a better job of optimising it than I could.