Fractal Engine

A Mandelbrot generator for the PC-Engine

Download the Fractal Engine demo here!
(ASM source code is included)

If you don't know what fractals are, they're an area of mathematics that generates some beautiful, intricate imagery from some very simple mathematical formulae. You can read up about the type that this program makes here.

(To the left is the splash screen you see when the ROM is first started up.)

Here's the main menu/panel where the parameters for the fractal can be controlled. Although the controls are explained on-screen, there are a few other things to know:

Select turns the panel on/off. When the panel is on, moving the joypad moves the cursor to each of the parameters. Pressing I or II changes the parameter.

Pressing RUN at any time with this panel on (or hidden) will set up the screen for a high-quality render, as can be seen below.

When the panel is off, moving the pad or pressing the I or II buttons will put the program into the Zoom Box mode. This is a lot easier for zooming into the fractal than changing a bunch of numbers.

A box will appear on-screen that you can move around with the pad, and resize with the I and II buttons. Press RUN to zoom in (or out). The box will then go to the edges of the screen, and the image will be zoomed in.

Press select to exit this mode.

OK, RUN has been pressed and the blocky preview image will now disappear and a high-quality (full-resolution) render will be drawn to the screen.

Renders can be either in 512x240 pixels...

... or 256x240. In any case, this full-detail render will probably take a LONG time, so be patient. Go make a cup of tea or something. This is an 8-bit CPU trying to do squares and multiplications of thousands of 32-bit numbers for a single image, so please understand!

At any rate, when the fractal is rendering, pressing I or II changes colour cycling. Pressing select CANCELS the render, so be careful.

And that's about it! This is not a serious tool, just a toy to play around with.

Have fun hunting for some cool & trippy fractals, like the ones on this page!