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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Sep 07, 2021 10:04 am

This past weekend I found an old floppy disk I didn't remember seeing before. it was so old the label literally fell off in my hands as the glue had crystallized and evaporated into dust.
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The glue actually bled through the sticker and feels like sandpaper to the touch. I have no recollection of where I got this disk.


All it said on the label was "Graphics Archive LZH". I'm all about finding cool images to display on my Amiga so I popped it in the drive.

After a few of those heartwarming disk read sounds I was presented with an interesting list of archived programs. The one that caught my eye was MandelMountains.

I unarchived it and moved the contents over to my Amiga's hard drive. I then fired it up.

It took me a while to figure out how to use the thing, but I soon was rendering - approximately one line at a time - "mountains" out of mandelbrot geometrical patterns!
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"Rocky mountain hiiiiiigh!"

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Is that WB 1.3 "Old Blue" blue? Why yes, it sure looks like it. ;)

MandelMountains is a shareware program that was released as 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1. My copy is 2.1, and it can be found on aminet here. This final release appears to have been published in early 1991 and found its way to the Fred Fish archive later that summer.

Created by Mathias Ortmann, he wrote in the accompanying readme:
MandelMountains gives you the ability to render wonderful three-dimensional images of blow-ups of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. The well-known color strips of the usual Mandelbrot images become at once mountainsides that smoothly climb to high plateaus, leaving deep valleys between them.
He continued:
You may have already seen images of this type (e.g. on the covers of the books "The Beauty of Fractals - Images of Complex Dynamical Systems" by H.-O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter or "The Science of Fractal Images", edited by H.-O. Peitgen and D. Saupe) - here and now you have the tool to create them on your own! MandelMountains allows you to produce high-quality non-interlaced or interlaced (and even overscan) images of arbitrary areas of the Mandelbrot/Julia sets. You can easily define magnification windows to zoom deeper and deeper into this fascinating world.
After seeing one of my renders, someone asked me if the image was in HAM mode. In fact, no. It's only 32 colors believe it or not. The way Ortmann accomplished this was by using 16 colors for the grayscale slopes, and 16 for the actual mandelbrots. Optionally you can enable the interlace mode, too, which will double the number
of available colors to 32 gray and 32 color tones. You can also pick the start and finish color points to create exotic and very trippy scenes.

The program can output both in PAL and NTSC modes as well as overscan. You can also switch the math to a Julia pattern which looks more like rivers or veins.

Finally, there is (of course) a zoom tool which allows you to zoom into any quadrant of an image to then re-render a new image of your zoom selection.

Fun and relaxing tool to create some very pretty imagery. Still boggles my mind this amazing and impressive machine was release in the mid-80s.





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