Yesterday’s retro fractal zoom has a proper home now. zoom_video.py lives in the python/ folder of my fractals repo, along with the scripts from the last update. It can spin the view and zoom back out again, and it runs a fair bit faster than it did.

What it draws

It dives from the whole Mandelbrot set down to the spot used by the old Andromeda Research demo, −1.74747070750 + 0.00087953063i, at 11.1 million times magnification. It only draws the edges between iteration bands and leaves the bands themselves black. Far from the set the bands are wide, so you get thin contour lines; close in they crowd together into solid colour. Each frame is rendered at 640×480 and doubled up with nearest-neighbour scaling, which keeps the chunky VGA feel.

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