HolyFract

A minimal Mandelbrot fractal renderer written in HolyC for TempleOS.
Renders a Mandelbrot set to the screen and allows basic navigation and zoom using keyboard input.

Overview

HolyFract implements a simple iterative Mandelbrot fractal visualizer.
Rendering is performed directly to a device context (CDC in TempleOS) using per-pixel iteration counts to determine the pixel color.

Features

• Gradient fractal rendering
  Basic Mandelbrot visualization in different shades of purple

• Keyboard navigation
  Arrow keys pan across the complex plane.
  [ A ] zooms in, [ D ] zooms out.

• Configurable iteration limit
  The maximum iteration depth is currently fixed to 128, but can be adjusted for precision vs performance.

• Coordinate mapping
  Screen-space coordinates are converted to complex-space using the current center (M_CX, M_CY) and scale factor.

Controls

Implementation Details

Coordinate Mapping

Each pixel (x, y) is mapped to a complex coordinate (re, im) using:

re = M_CX + (x - (GR_WIDTH / 2)) * scale im = M_CY + (y - (GR_HEIGHT / 2)) * scale

This ensures the fractal remains centered on the current viewport origin.

Iteration Function

The core iteration loop:

zr, zi = 0
for i in 0..max_iter:
    zr2 = zr²
    zi2 = zi²

    t = zr * zi
    zi = 2 * t + im
    zr = zr2 - zi2 + re

    if zr2 + zi2 > 4 → escape

return max_iter

Returns the iteration count where the iterations escape to infinity, or max_iter if the point remains bounded.

Rendering

Each pixel’s iteration count is converted to a shade of purple:

U32 MandelColor(I64 iter, I64 max_iter)
{
    if (iter >= max_iter || iter <= 4) return 0;

    return (iter >> 3) & (COLORS_NUM - 1);
}

Color logic is isolated in MandelColor(). And setting the palette is handled in ApplyFractalPalette():

U0 ApplyFractalPalette()
{
    I64 i;
    CBGR48 bgr;

    GrPaletteColorSet(0, 0x000000);
    for (i = 1; i < COLORS_NUM; i++)
    {
        I64 v = (0xFFFF * i) / (COLORS_NUM - 1);
        bgr.r = v >> 1;
        bgr.g = 0;
        bgr.b = v;

        GrPaletteColorSet(i, bgr);
    }
}

Performance

Current implementation renders frames in sub-grids. Over time, all pixels are filled without a heavy full-frame pass. Which keeps zooming/panning a bit more responsive.

Preview

Initial gradient render – 128 iterations per pixel

Zoomed in view of the fractal - 4096 iterations per pixel

while (ScanKey(&ch, &sc))

Needs to be replaced with a proper buffer flush method once available.