XaoS is a fractal viewer program which is designed for smooth continuous zooming. It's a great way to explore fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set. Nowadays, multi-core CPUs are the norm, but the Windows binary of XaoS does not support multi-thread operation.
XaoS is easy to build in Cygwin. The only problem is that XaoS is set up to build for MinGW (using -mno-cygwin) and Cygwin doesn't provide Pthreads support for MinGW applications. The solution is to use Pthreads-w32. Using this and running with the "-threads 4" option I'm able to use up to 100% CPU on my Q6600, and XaoS is much faster.
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Any chance you'd like to make these binaries available for people who don't want to build them themselves? I'd love to see what Xaos could do on some bigger iron...
I initially didn't distribute the binary because I didn't use all the libraries that XaoS normally links with. As a result, PNG file saving, internationalization and custom formulae are not available. Anyways, here's the binary.
Here's my first attempt at a full build.
Custom formulae crash in multi-threaded mode but work in single-threaded mode. This is due to a known bug in XaoS.
VERY cool. Thank you -- thank you -- thank you! Realtime mandels are at last a possibility.
Since drop.io is closing, the links I provided above will stop working. Here are new links hosted on Dropbox: the preliminary basic build and the full featured build.
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