Zooming Mandelbrot Screensaver v2

The sad death of Benoit Mandelbrot this week has prompted me to update my zooming Mandelbrot Set screensaver. The old version was pretty enough to look at but annoying as hell to have set as your actual screensaver, so I rewrote it from the ground up yesterday afternoon, with all the processing optimised and tucked away in a background thread, where it won’t interfere with checking for mouse movements and suchlike.

It also has multiple-monitor support, although I only have one screen and therefore haven’t tested it. Essentially, a separate copy of the screensaver is run for each monitor, so I’ve no idea how it will cope with that. It also has a cursory explanation of the maths in the settings page so that non-nerds can at least have a stab at setting good options for their system.

What it doesn’t have is any kind of framerate limiter, so if it runs too fast you should just increase the quality of the images until it’s sensible. Likewise if it’s too slow, decrease the quality of the images.

Download (11 kB so you may as well) – to install, just copy into C:\Windows or whatever your Windows directory is, and it should appear in the screen saver settings page.

Requires zip support and the .NET framework 4; most recent Windows versions should have these installed.

There does seem to be the odd weird fleck within the Set, as if there’s a calculation glitch. I don’t know what’s causing that. Other than that, let me know if there are any problems with it.