U009@CCIW.BITNET (04/06/90)
As revealed recently on GEnie, the Lynx game "Chip's Challenge" has a secret mode. If the password "MAND" is entered, the game changes into a Mandelbrot and Julia set explorer. While the performance is poor by mainframe standards, the opening screen giving the largest representation of the whole region takes about 5 minutes to compute. The joypad posi positions a 1/4 screen rectangle for zooming in and out by powers of 2. There is a screen available with the middle option button giving the current coordinates and zoom factor. The zoom factor seems to have 40 bits of significance, but all the parameters are given in hex inxx the form XX.XXXXXXXXXXXXX to 48 bits. Arround the boundaries of the zone at high magnifications, the compute speed is quite acceptable for a kid (like me!). The Option 2 button will cycle the color look up table CW or CCW for a neat animation. (Computing ceases while the animation is on.) I regret that I deleted the original message without noting the name of the person who found this and therefore can't thank them publicly here. (It might have been the programmer who wrote it too.) Regards, Stu Beal, VE3MWM, (U009@CCIW.BITNET), National Water Research Institute, Burlington, Ontario, Canada. The future lies ahead. And behind us lies, lies... lies.
david_r_watters@alligator.cis.ohio-state.edu (04/09/90)
In article <5A04060A29370275-MTACY830*U009@CCIW> U009@CCIW.BITNET writes: >As revealed recently on GEnie, the Lynx game "Chip's Challenge" has a >secret mode. If the password "MAND" is entered, the game changes into >a Mandelbrot and Julia set explorer. While the performance is poor by . >speed is quite acceptable for a kid (like me!). The Option 2 button >will cycle the color look up table CW or CCW for a neat animation. >(Computing ceases while the animation is on.) Wrong. The color cycling is one of the many built in graphics functions and does not stop the computation nor even slow it down! After hiting option2 it stops, you can then hit option1 to continue redering while it cycles. If you hit option2 again it will reverse direction, a third time will stop it. If there is any pause of about 15sec. the Lynx will automatically start generating again, with or without the cycle on. You can also pick from 13 color palettes, and very the speed of the cycle. DW