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Hey guys,

I thought you might be interested to check out a quick hack of a screensaver/exporer for the traditional Mandelbrot set. It was primarily meant for screensaver use, but the exploring part was kind of mandatory too during development :-)

Get it right here: http://users.uoa.gr/~knakos/mandel.zip (http://users.uoa.gr/~knakos/mandel.zip)

The whole calculation takes place in a pixel shader, so the requirement is that DirectX 9 is installed, as well as pixel shader 3.0 support from the graphics card (any fairly recent one will do the trick). When run normally, it allows interactive exploring of the set. Renaming the exe to .scr and selecting it as a screen saver uses a non-interactive random walk around the set (check out the readme for installation and use). Note that it was built with visual studio 2010, so included in the .zip is the c runtime .dll file, as there is a pretty slim chance that anyone has that yet (the .dll should be in the same folder as the exe or, of course, in the windows\system32 directory for the program to run).

Single floating point precision, no fancy stuff. Just give it a go :-)

Attached are a couple of screenshots,
Cheers,
Kostas

Thanks for the notice and link.     :D