The fractals repo from my Pascal Mandelbrot post didn’t stay still for long. There’s a fifth Pascal program you can explore with, and some Python scripts that draw other kinds of fractals in a retro style.

mandelbrot5: an interactive explorer

mandelbrot4 could pan and zoom, but only by rerunning it with new numbers. mandelbrot5 turns it into an explorer you drive with the keyboard. It fills the terminal and follows it when you resize it, and every frame is redrawn in place.

This one tickled my 8 bit brain.

I remember having to leave my BBC Micro on overnight to calculate a single low res image of a Mandelbrot fractal. Now, with a couple of prompts and a bit of to and fro with the Claude app on my phone, it renders a whole retro styled zoom video like this in a couple of minutes.

Retro fractal zoom on Flickr

A bit of evening fun: I wanted to see how far a quick vibe coding session could take a Mandelbrot renderer in Free Pascal, drawing straight into the terminal. Pascal was one of the first languages I used, and the Mandelbrot set is the classic “hello world” of fractals, so it seemed like a good pairing.

The result is alastairhm/fractals: four small programs, each one building on the one before, going from plain ASCII art up to truecolor half-block graphics.