Short: Utterly cool Mandelbrot prog. from CygnusSoft For the description of this file, I simply put some really important information at the beginning and then appended the readme. . Version 1.001 has some trivial changes made from version 1.000 to ensure full compatibility with the Picasso video board. . Mand2000 is a really cool fractal exploration program. Revolutionary in many ways. Fundamentally useless, as is the nature of fractals, but lots of fun. All that is required is an Amiga with 2.04 or higher. It will run on a 68000 with very little memory (1 meg is pretty much required I think) but it likes all the power you can throw at it. . This version is fully functional except for save and print. . For more details, read the rest of this description, or download it and read the readme. . For those of you who like animations, yes, Mand2000 lets you make several different kinds of animations, some never seen before (I think). . Bruce Dawson, of Cygnus Software . Cygnus Software 33 University Square, #199 Madison, WI, 53715 USA . . Introduction: . Mand2000D is the demo version of Mand2000, a fractal exploration program created by Cygnus Software. Mand2000 is a tryware program. You can use the demo version all you want, give it to your friends, put it on club disks (including the disks of Fred Fish of course) and post it to bulletin boards, as long as you distribute this notice and the example ARexx scripts with it. . However, this demo version has had save crippled (saving from ARexx only, no saving of fractal location information, a maximum save size, and a stripe along the right edge of some pictures), and will occasionally bring up a text requester to remind you that it is a demo version. The release version does save of course, and no annoying requesters will appear. See below for more information on ordering your copy. . . Installation: . To install the Mand2000 demo, make a directory on your hard drive, or format a floppy disk, and copy the Mand2000D and TweenPlayer programs, and Mand2000Demo.help to that directory. This can be done by just dragging the icons to the drawer using Workbench. Then you should copy the ARexx scripts to your rexx: directory. Even if you don't program in ARexx you should still copy these scripts because they add some very nice menu commands. To copy the ARexx scripts to rexx: simply double click on the InstallRexx icon. . The TweenPlayer is for playing TweenMovies, which are created from the `Make zoom movie' menu in Mand2000D. Read the online help for further information. . . Description: . What is Mand2000? . Mand2000 is meant to be nothing less than the finest Mandelbrot exploration program available on any computer. We have attempted to combine speed, power and simplicity with a few unique features, all designed to make it easy for you to discover uncharted regions of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. . What makes Mand2000 different? . Point and click animated zooming is the most intuitive way of exploring the Mandelbrot and Julia sets that we could think of. It's as easy as using a zoom lens on a camera. And to the best of our knowledge no one else uses this method. . Until now the idea of driving through the Mandelbrot set would have been absurd - now it's a reality. Plug in your joystick and scroll and zoom your way around the most complex object ever seen. . Mand2000's multi-pass drawing means that even slower Amigas can take a test drive. It lets you see roughly what the final picture is going to look like in mere seconds - even for pictures that will take several minutes to complete. This allows you to decide almost instantly whether to keep zooming, or wait for the completed picture. . Morphing is pretty trendy today, but you'll probably still be surprised to hear that Mand2000 has a morph option. Create stunning animations of the Mandelbrot set smoothly morphing into a circle. . Mand2000 also lets you make Mandelbrot Zoom movies. Instead of wasting time, disk space, and memory to calculate every frame in the animation, Mand2000 optionally calculates the key frames and fills in the intermediate frames at playback. The result: Movies are calculated about ten times faster and take far less space on disk. And, since Mand creates postage stamp versions of your images to use as icons, you can see what your animations will look like, as soon as you open a directory. . Once Mand2000 has created a series of pictures, and icons for them, you can use Workbench to create a tiny flip movie to show you what the real movie will look like. Open up the drawer that the frames are in, and size it so that it's only tall enough for one icon. Then select `clean up' from the Workbench menus and all of the icons should line up in a row. Now size the window so that it's a bit wider than the individual icons, and then click in the body of the horizontal scroll bar. Workbench will display the next icon. Repeated clicking plays the movie! Silly? Probably. You decide. . Another first for Mand2000 is the Show Location menu function. If you're zoomed way into the Mandelbrot set, it can be very easy to forget where in the set you are, and very difficult to find out. Show location makes it easy by opening up another fractal window and displaying your location in it. You can watch the box move as you zoom and scroll, or you can zoom the new window in for a more precise view of where you are. This invaluable feature makes it orders of magnitude easier to find the many relationships between shapes and locations in the Mandelbrot set, and makes discovering the relationships between Mandeblrot and Julia sets easy. . Mand2000 has a very sophisticated multi-window, multi-requester design. You can adjust parameters and see the changes in real time as Mand2000 continues calculating while you use the requesters. Leave as many requesters open as you want. Leave as many fractal windows open as you want. . Mand2000 is also one the only program we know of that has the tested capability to zoom in on a Mandelbrot set one thousand times (magnification of 10 to the three hundredth). We know it can. We did it! . Mand2000 is fast. We won't claim that it is the fastest, because there is always some smart kid out there waiting to prove you wrong when you make that claim. But we believe that Mand2000's zoom animation, iteration count preservation, multi-pass drawing, constant calculating and other features make it usually the fastest one in real world tests. . Just a few of the other features include: literally dozens of different math routines for accuracies ranging from 16 bit to 1000+ bits, with separate versions custom coded for 68000, 68020, 68040 and 68881, a very comprehensive on-line help, printing, multi-level undo, built in locations to start you searching, full featured ARexx support and a lot of other things not available in the demo version. . These are just some of the more significant and innovative features in Mand2000. There are dozens more, all tightly crafted and seamlessly tied together with a level of quality you would expect to pay hundreds of dollars for. We will accept such payments, or will settle for $34.95 sent to: . Cygnus Software. 33 University Square, #199 Madison, Wisconsin 53715 USA. . How do you use Mand2000? . To start using Mand2000, the simplest thing to do is to place the mouse over an interesting area, one of the areas with lots of detail, and then double click the left mouse button. The picture will zoom in, placing the area under the mouse in the centre of the screen. You can continue doing this as many times as you like, searching for interesting areas. To zoom out press `D'. To scroll the picture around, hold down the left mouse button and drag, use the arrow keys, the numeric keypad, or a joystick. . For full information on how to use Mand2000, read the help associated with the individual menu items. Just highlight a menu item and press the help key or press the help key any time a requester is active. . Mand2000 runs on all Amigas with AmigaDOS 2.0 or higher. It has been tested for compatability on Amiga 2000s, 3000s, 4000s, 500s and 1200s, with 68000, 68020, 68030 and 68040 processors, and should run on all other models as well. . . . . History: . Cygnus Software's first product was MandFXP, the first fixed point fractal program for the Amiga. MandFXP was the first fractal program to run at usable speeds, even on a 68000. At the time, in 1986, it was quite an impressive product and was very popular. . Cygnus Software's next product was CygnusEd. CygnusEd is a high performance text editor, featuring what is probably still the fastest scrolling and text rendering of any editor on the Amiga today. Add to that such invaluable features as unlimited undo, etc., etc. Version 3.5 of CygnusEd was extensively updated to take advantage of the features that 2.0 has to offer. 3-D gadgets, public screens, the standard file, font and screen requesters, and the full AGA screen resolutions. Meanwhile CygnusEd still maintains full compatibility with version 1.3 of the operating system, bringing the 3-D gadgetry to 1.3. CygnusEd 3.5's macro and configuration files and ARexx scripts are almost 100% compatible with earlier versions. CygnusEd is published by ASDG Inc., and is available in Amiga stores for a suggested retail price of $119.95. Remember, although CygnusEd was written by Cygnus Software, it is sold through ASDG, and NOT through Cygnus Software. . Mand2000 was created with CygnusEd and Aztec C. . And now Mand2000. A brand new fractal program, written from scratch to take advantage of all that the new brand of Amigas have to offer. Mand2000 takes full advantage of floating point units. It makes use of the thirty-two bit multiply instructions of the 68020 processors and above. And it even has special optimizations aimed specifically at the 68040 processor. But while Mand2000 has been optimized to take full advantage of the most powerful processors available for the Amiga, it has also been optimized for 68000 processors. All of the calculations run faster than those in MandFXP. Add to that the vastly improved user interface with multiple windows, multi-tasking requesters, animated zooms and many more functions and you have a clearly superior fractal exploration program. And of course it has an ARexx interface. . We truly believe that Mand2000 is the next step in fractal exploration. . Enjoy! . Bruce and Helen Dawson, Cygnus Software.