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A little documentation to go with the program .....

The 'Fizzy Fractals' screen-saver generates and displays amazingly beautiful fractal images in random order. The image points are also randomly generated, creating a 3D steroegram effect as the image is displayed. It is from this that the program gets its name.

The configuration screen is a tabbed dialog with the following parts:-

Registration
============
When you register, you will be sent a unique registration code. You can enter the code here and the program is then registered. The (UNREGISTERED) text no longer appears in the title and this dialog no longer appears.

Fractal Types
=============
This dialog determines the type of fractal images that will be generated and displayed. If more than on button is checked, the program will randomly select one of the checked types. It is intended that this group be expanded in future releases and that the number of images of each type will also be expanded. Please let me know if you have any particular favourites.

Colour Schemes
==============
This dialog can be used to select any (or all) of the 16 colour schemes currently available. 'Mono', 'Raindow' and the 6 'Bold' schemes are all just as good in 256 colour mode, whereas the others really benefit from high colour, or better. If more than one button is checked, the program will randomly select one of the checked colour schemes.

Blanking Methods
================
This dialog can be used to define the way in which the screen is blanked before the next image is generated. 'Fizzy Fade' is the reverse of the image generation, with all points of the screen being randomly turned black. 'Fast Fade' (the default option), simply blanks the screen and 'No Fade' leaves the previous image on the screen, and the new image 'pushes through'. If more than on button is checked, the program will randomly select one of the checked blanking methods.

Iteration Options
=================
This dialog can be used to control the iteration options. There are two groups here - the general and specific.
Under the 'General' group, use the 'Completion delay' to specify the time delay before the completed image is cleared and a new one started. This can be anything between 0 and 300 seconds (i.e. up to a maximum of 5 minutes). As mentioned earlier, as the image is generated, a 3D sterogram image will be seen and this (depending on the screen resolution) can use quite a bit of memory. By default, the 'Use Extra Memory' option is unchecked. This results is a slightly faster image generation, with a somewhat enhanced 3D effect (due to the less refined way in which the image is generated). Checking this option will result in a slightly slower, finer image generation. It is important to note that in both cases, the final image is absolutely identical.
The 'Specific' group can be used to speed up, or slow down the image generation. It should be noted that the image generations is very CPU intensive and the speed of the image generation is very much hardware dependant. Essentially, increase the minimum number of iterations to slow down the image generation (and also to improve the image detail) and reduce the maximum number of iterations to speed up the image generation (which could lose a bit of detail). In the case of the maximum, images that would have used a higher number of iterations can either be excluded from the available images, or have the number of iteration reduced to the specified maximum. As a guideline figure, the default for the number of iterations is around the 100 to 250 range. Also, if a particular point can be determined within the first few iterations, a high minimum value will have no effect. (If all this is just too much gibberish, don't worry about it - just leave the minimum and maximum fields as the default zero and enjoy the images). Please note that the minimum cannot exceed the maximum. 

Hotkeys
=======
Many people have wanted to see some of the generated images for longer than the 300 second maximum delay and even more have wanted to save the images to the hard disk. Well, these are both now possible !! You can define hotkeys to perform selected actions and so far, three are available.
If you find that the current image is either taking too long to generate, or doesn't look too interesting, then you can define a hotkey that will scrap it and go straight to the next fractal image.
You can define a hotkey that will cause the image to pause. Press the key again to carry on drawing.
You can define a hotkey to save the current screen image as a .bmp file on the hard disk, in a directory of your choice. This directory can either be entered directly in the 'Location' part, or you can press the 'Browse' button to select a directory on your system. If no directory is given, files will land in the c:\ directory. The generated files will have the naming structure 'Fizzy Fractals nnnnn.bmp', where 'nnnnn' is an incremental sequence number.
A few points to note are that the hotkeys must be activated by clicking the appropriate 'Activate' toggle and (of course) they must be different. Also, they operate independently from one another - i.e. you can pause the display, save it to disk and then press the pause hotkey again to carry on drawing. 
The really good thing about all of this, is that (although the program is a screensaver) it just carries on drawing, even though you have pressed a key !!!
The decision to use bitmap files is deliberate, as they are fast to generate and I didn't want to get involved with having to support many different graphic formats. Bitmaps really are the 'lowest common denominator' of graphic formats and if you want to convert them to a smaller format (eg jpeg) then there are numerous programs for this. Paint Shop Pro is an excellent program that I would recommend for this purpose.

About
=====
This dialog has a few details of the program, as well as contact information.

Click the 'Cancel' button (or press escape) to abandon any changes and exit the screen.

Click the 'OK' button (or press <Return>) to save the current configuration and exit the screen.

There is no nag screen, but the 'UNREGISTERED' text in the dialog title does not appear in the registered version.

That's about it on the documentation front - I hope you enjoy the program.
