>> It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
>> somewhat left behind by now...
>
> Is it open source? It would seem to be the kind of thing that isn't hard
> to keep up to date, at least at the core.

Yeah, the source code is completely open.

On the other hand, the entire UI is text-mode fun and games using BIOS 
calls, and the entire graphical engine revolves around either calling 
the BIOS or directly poking magic numbers into hardware registers. 
(Wanna guess why it doesn't work under Windows any more?)

On top of that, the entire program fundamentally assumes you're working 
with 6 bits per channel and palette graphics. These assumptions are not 
easy to change. (E.g., all of the external file formats describe colours 
as triples of integers between 0 and 63.)

Really, it would be simpler and quicker to just start again. And indeed 
many modern fractal programs understand FractInt parameter files as a 
sort of de facto data standard. (Although none of them have the layers 
upon layers of backwards compatibility that FractInt itself has, and 
AFAIK none of them can read the data chunks that FractInt embeds in the 
GIF files it writes.)

Then again, I'm not really aware of any freeware program that has quite 
the range of scope that FractInt has. Most of them seem to plot just one 
kind of fractal, and that's it...

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