r/atari8bit • u/FredSchwartz • 2d ago
Last Mandelbrot: 3D, HIP, real hardware, about 3 minutes
This flickers a little bit to my eye on this Commodore 1702 CRT because it's using HIP, a technique to flip between two different graphics modes on alternating frames to get more shades.
Image generates in about 3 minutes - still fast thanks to fixed-point arithmetic and elimination of all multiplications in favor of squares table-lookup generated at runtime. Uses the extra memory on the 800XL compared to the 800 to hold that 32KB lookup table.
HIP:
https://github.com/ilmenit/atari-800-skills/blob/main/graphics/advanced-fx.md
https://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl/hip_1.htm
https://atarimuseum.ctrl-alt-rees.com/archives/atari-8-bit-faq/faq-doc-63.html