Basically - pardon the pun - XBASIC compiles directly to assembly (the CPU's native language) whereas I believe TrueBasic is tokenized/run time interpreted, which adds a lot of overhead to the program, thus slowing it tremendously.

As for not seeing it draw, I use a little trick called frame buffering.

BUT!!!! The program can get bogged down. Assuming you have the full dataset, if you set the date for January 1st, 2005, then zoom out all the way, then set the time span parameter from it's default of 180 all the way up to 999 days, you'll see it bog down big time. On my 2.4 Ghz machine it takes 2.5 seconds to draw each frame, which has over 103,000 quakes plotted. Unless you're a masochist, I don't suggest doing this on those slower machines.

For the next version I want to add a frame rate control for playback, in order to slow it down as needed. Necessarily, I will have to have some sort of overload detection which can be used to keep the program from getting bogged down.

Brian