>X a o S<
CREDITS (alphabetically):
Eric Courteau (ecourteau@cplus.fr)
- Francais.cat (translation of tutorials)
Radek Doulik (rodo@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz)
- GTK interface, windowid patches
Tim Goodwin (tgoodwin@cygnus.co.uk)
- english.cat corrections
Jan Hubicka (hubicka@paru.cas.cz)
- Zooming routines, ugly interface,
palettes,drivers, autopilot, filters,
documentation, tutorials, maitainer etc...
Jens Kilian (jjk@acm.org)
- BeOS driver, deutsch.cat
Thomas A. K. Kjaer(takjaer@imv.aau.dk)
- OS/2 ports (320x200 graphics and AA-lib)
Thomas Marsh
- First zoomer, formulas, planes,
X11 driver, inversions, many ideas
Terje Pedersen (terjepe@login.eunet.no)
- Amiga port
Fabrice Premel (premelfa@etu.utc.fr)
- Periodicity checking
Charles Vidal
- Tcl/Tk interface
Tapio K. Vocaldo(taps@rmx.com)
- Macintosh port
INTRODUCTION:
XaoS is a fast portable real-time interactive fractal zoomer.
It displays the Mandelbrot set (among other escape time
fractals) and allows you zoom smoothly into the fractal.
Various coloring modes are provided for both the points inside
and outside the selected set. In addition, switching between
Julia and Mandelbrot fractal types and displaying planes is
provided. The first version was a poorly written Mandelbrot
view by Thomas later modified by Jan to support high frame-rate
zooming. Other additions were later made including autopilot
(for those of you without drivers licenses), palette changing,
PNG saving, and fractal inversion.
SUPPORTED PLATFORMS(for now)
UNIX LIKE:
X11 (8bpp pseudocolor 8,15,16,24,32 truecolor, StaticGray and
StaticColor only)
Curses (now obsoleted by AA-lib driver)
SVGAlib (svgalib 1.2.10 or newer recomended)
AA-lib (high quality ascii art)
GGI (General graphics interface)
OTHER OS: (with native support):
BeBox
Hurd (AA-lib driver only)
Macintosh (displays with 8bit support only)
MS-DOS (djgpp/allegro - VESA 3.0/2.0/1.0, VBE/AF
8,15,16 and 32 bit depths,
VGA - 320x200 and X modes,
S3, Cirrus, ET4000 and others in
resolutions 256x256-1200x1600
AAlib - approx. 50 different text modes for VGA/MDA
including dual monitor support)
OS/2 (320x200, VESA, XFree86 and many text modes)
plan9 (8 1/2 terminals)
KNOWN TO WORK ALSO AT:
Hurd
Amiga (256 workbench displays only, using Xlib emulation)
Windowze (DOS prompt)
All platforms with at least ansi-c compatible compiler and text output
REQUIREMENTS:
XaoS uses floating point math for its calculations. This may
be slow on some computers. The program was developed on
a Pentium running at 120 MHz, but it can work quite well (20fps)
on 486Dx/2. I also received nice letters from users using
XaoS at 386/40 or so. Coprocessor is _REALLY_ required.
Faster computer is better so alpha/600MHZ recomended.
To compile XaoS you need ANSI compliant compiler with _GOOD_
optimizations. Unix version uses configure script. Other
platforms uses different ways. GNU CC is highly recommended.
Graphics drivers usually have some additional requirements.
(for example xlib for X11, djgpp and allegro for dos port)
Also fast malloc/free routines are recomended because they
are called quite often (10 times per frame). For full
featured XaoS (with image saving code) you also need zlib
and libpng.
FEATURES:
o Fast smooth interactive realtime zooming. Even on 486!
o 11 fractal formulas:
Mandelbrot power 2 - Mandelbrot power 6
octo, Barnsley, Newton, Phoenix, Magnet
o Autopilot (enhanced in this version)
o bitmap, 8bpp with palette, fixedcolor, grayscale and
arbitary truecolor (16, 24 or 32bpp) support
o Three algorithms for random palettes
o Saving to PNG files
o Saving/restoring current possition
o Animation save/replay
o Animated tutorials:
Introduction to fractals
Features overview
Math behind fractals
Whats new
Supported languages for tutorials:
English
Francais
Cesky
o 10 outcoloring modes + 10 incoloring modes
o 10 true-color coloring modes
o Boundary detection
o Periodicity checking
o Unrolled calculation loops
o Realtime image rotation
o More than 50 examples
o An AA driver that provides high quality ascii art
rendering at many platforms
(see AA-project homepage at http://www.ta.jcu.cz/aa)
o both Mandelbrot and Julia forms of fractals
o fast julia preview (now for all formulas)
o special image stretching algorithm for fast zooming
now reeaches 150 FPS on pentium 130 in fullscreen
320x200 mode
o solid guessing
o many supported platforms including text mode drivers
o zoom up to 64051194700380384 times
o unzooms more than 1267966761981568116729735090176 times
o Color cycling
o Dynamic resolution (Now really improved)
o Fast julia browsing mode
o Supports non-standard monitor sizes
o SMP support
o POSIX threads API
o plan9
o BeOS
o post caluclation filters:
o motion blur
o Random dot stereograms in animation
o Interlace filter
o Two edge detection filters
o Starfield generator
o Emboss
o Palette emulation filter
o Dithering on devices w/o user defined palette
FTP:
XaoS comes in various files:
XaoS-3.0.tar.gz sources
XaoS*.rpm Red-hat packages
XaoS*.deb Debian packages
xaos30s.zip Sources in zip format for DOS users
xaos30b.zip .exe file for DOS
XaoS30-OS2.zip .exe file for OS/2
Macxaos_2.2.sea.hqx Macintosh distribution
xaos30.lzh Amiga binarry. Note that this
file is uploaded only to aminet.
All can be found at following site:
ftp.ta.jcu.cz /pub/linux/hubicka
UNIX version:
sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/Incoming (will be moved somewhere)
tsx-11.mit.edu now in /incoming..will be placed into
/pub/linux/binaries/usr.bin or
/pub/linux/sources/usr.bin
ftp.x.org /contrib/graphics
MS-DOS version:
ftp.simtel.net /pub/simtelnet/msdos/graphics
HOME-PAGE:
There are currently two different pages about XaoS. The orriginal
one at: http://www.paru.cas.cz/~hubicka/XaoS/
and the new one: http://www.gnu.org/XaoS
U.S mirrors of homepage are not maitained anymore.
MAILING-LIST:
XaoS now have following mailing lists at
majordomo@horac.ta.jcu.cz
xaos
this list is for general xaos discusion
(ideas, questions, bugreports..)
xaos-announce
keeps you informed about new versions
xaos-devel
you want to become XaoS developer? Subscribe here and
let us know about you! You will be welcomed.
To subscribe send following message to
majordomo@horac.ta.jcu.cz:
subscribe [list_name]
INSTALL:
Installation methods are described in the file "INSTALL".
USAGE:
Since version 2.0 XaoS have lots of command line options.
They are depend on its configuration, available drivers etc.
See xaos -h for full help. Usually more than one driver is
available. XaoS after startup tries to auto-detect best one.
For example in GNU/Linux case tests driver in following order:
SVGAlib
X11
AA
curses
If you want to force text display instead of graphics you may
use -driver curses. Use xaos -list for list of all available
drivers.
Once XaoS started, you may see animated tutorial by pressing 'H'
twice or read help (by pressing 'H' once).
THANKS TO:
Unknown Samorai from Brazil
- for $20 (Your email don't work)
Stanislav "XaoS" Mikes
- for the name of our program
Borislav Deianov
- for sharing ideas
Isaac Newton
- for discovering his method
Benoit B. Mandelbrot
- for ordering the Julia sets
Richard M. Stallman
- for GNU
Linus Torvalds
- for the best kernel
Tim Wegner & Bert Tyler
- for Fractint
Darryl House
- for making Fractint's code readable
NO THANKS TO:
Bill Gates
