[IronBacon]

I remember as a teen I did mine in 68000 assembly on a Commodore Amiga to get it reasonable fast considering it was running on a 16 MHz CPU — i would say a few seconds to draw the canonical image — but IIRC it reached pretty fast the limit of math precision.

At that time I didn't know what was a complex number, but was fascinated by the whole concept of fractals and how complex structures could be created with a relative simple program.

[Baeocystin]

A few seconds? Wow! I did a science fair project on the Mandelbrot set using my Amiga 2000, and it took me a good 45+ minutes to generate a single 320x200 color image. IIRC, I wrote the generator in some variant of Pascal, and was so happy with the performance increase over Basic on my C=128...

I ran in to the precision limit pretty quickly, same as you. I didn't understand computers well enough to know that's what the problem was, and I remember spending hours pouring over my code, trying to figure out where the bug was. Good times. :D

[IronBacon]

If I'm not confusing it with something else, I seem to recall that when zooming on the set the calculation was nearly instantaneous. As you said, good times! ^__^

I still have that A500 but who knows where I put those floppies, I'm tempted to turn it on but I'm scared the PSU will blow itself...

[vardump]

The difference is probably you used floats and he/she used fixed point (integers). Of course that way you do run out of precision very quickly.

Software emulated floats on Amiga 2000 were really, really slow.