This is an archive of CompuServe forum messages from 1985 to 1995, as saved in transcripts by John Foust.
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Oh, Rudy was working for Autodesk at the time.
To be precise, I wrote the bulk of the program; Rudy provided the up-and-stumbling prototypes of some pieces of it, and I turned it into a product.
I've heard the rumour. Dunno if it is true. Jim Gleick recovered some of the rights to it, but nobody's asked me anything about the source code, so it's possible that just the title and nothing else has been transferred. The ERRORLEVEL thing was a last-minute stupid mistake…999 indeed…
I hope you understand that CHAOS was never tested at all under Windows, any version. Frankly, I'm amazed that it works at all; it quite merrily writes directly to the screen, and has no interest whatsoever in sharing its space with any other programs. It is also quite demanding on…
A good general answer to "where can I find file so-and-so on CIS" is "go ibmff" (assuming you are on an IBM clone; I think there's also a "go macff", and there is a "go graphff" for graphics files in general.
Just get your hands on a copy of FRACTINT, the wonderful freeware fractal program. It explains all the formulas real well — and you can get the source, too.
"Not much interaction"? Surely you jest.
Gee, I dunno. Perhaps you might call there and find out. (And I dunno if the Egghead where I live is still selling CHAOS either; I haven't been there in a few months.)
Thanks for the information. No, I don't know _any_ of this; I'm not involved with any aspects of CHAOS any more, and never was with CALab.
That's odd; Egghead has been selling CHAOS for at least a year in my neck of the woods, and was the first major chain to carry it. Perhaps they've got it indexed as "James Gleick's CHAOS: The Software", and not cross-referenced as just "CHAOS"? A "TSR" is a "terminate-and-stay-resident" program…
It won't do any good to increase your RAM; CHAOS doesn't care about anything other than the "640K" of base memory. The fact that the software "calls for 640KB" is pretty irrelevant — it's really just a warning that CHAOS will pig out on however much memory is available, and…
CHAOS makes no use of expanded or extended memory. It will run on an XT, but very slowly. (I know at least a couple people who upgraded their hardware specifically to run this program.)
CHAOS will work just fine without a mouse; I don't _think_ I programmed anything that can only be done with a mouse, though using the keyboard might be more tedious for some operations. In general, the arrow keys will nicely navigate around the menus. The use of the TAB key…
It sounds to me like Metashel isn't unloading properly. (100K or so is about the size for that.) Are you getting any warning messages from the CHAOS batch file?
I assure you that CHAOS pays no attention whatsoever to any of these variables; neither does Metashel. I've not a clue what is going on, but is sure is interesting. It is possible that the SVGA Bios sets something up that isn't reset if you first run something that pays…
Slight correction: it was a promo piece for CHAOS.
"Craters" is indeed a lot of fun. I'm not really sure why we didn't include it in CHAOS either — there wasn't really a technical reason, just a kinda arbitrary decision. Possibly it just wasn't sufficiently tweakable. The odd part is: Craters was the first piece of what became CHAOS…
Actually, that 999 number was a DSP error on my part; the number shoulda been 255. Nothing over 255 makes any sense at all.
I sure sympathize with you folk — I wrote the thing, and it won't run at all on my usual DRDOS6 setup — I have to boot from a floppy to get it to work. Make it a bit embarrassing when I want to show of my work!
AutoCAD uses an awful lot of intermediate files, creating and deleting them on the fly during the course of a session (as you'll discover if you reboot rather than exiting AutoCAD — there will be temporary files sitting around.) Thus, if you delete a file, then continue an AutoCAD session,…
That's incorrect, Carl. All of CHAOS runs at 640×480, or, if on an EGA rather than a VGA, at 640×350, except for "rendering" in the FORGE module, which runs at 320×200. Never any higher than 640×480 (except for my own version at home, which runs at 1024×768, hee hee.)
Not quite true. Chaos runs in 640x480x16 on most of the modules; the Toy Universes piece runs in 640×350 (so it can do page flipping); and the Fractal Forgeries part also uses 320x200x256.