Back in the days of i386 processors, long distance dialup connections and 5.25" floppy drives, I spent a lot of time with a program called FractInt. You could pick an algorithm, set up the location, zoom level and color palette and then wait minutes, hours or days for it to calculate a TOTALLY AWESOME image.
Now that processors are screaming fast and AS3 is about catching up to the speed of real programming languages, I decided to port the Mandelbrot algorithm and see how fast it could be rendered. This 132x132 image is being calculated each frame with up to 200 iterations per pixel.
Z = zoom in X = zoom out mouse = pan