21–30 of 39 posts
Another way of looking at this is that the end of screen savers means the end of a small culture. I don't remember where I got this idea but I coded up a screensaver very quickly once. The idea was it periodically would make a 1/2 x 1/2 size copy of the screen and then copy it to the bottom right, bottom left and top center of the screen. This converges on a fixpoint called the Serpinski Gasket. On Windows it was pre…
I just want the "Lunatic Fringe" game back!
There's also this, which I vaguely remember working for me years ago, but can't vouch for now: http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/
I have incredibly fond memories of playing Lunatic Fringe, despite being very bad at it, and despite catching a ridiculously bad case of strep throat one year shortly after discovering it, and having some bad, vaguely-related fever dreams about.
I just want the "Lunatic Fringe" game back!
http://sealiesoftware.com/fringe/
Ben Haller still maintains a version of Satori and Rose for Mac OS X:
If you are sufficiently old and autistic, you can still buy the licensed flying toasters screen saver from a Japanese company called infinisys: http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml I was.
I'm less interested in Flying Toasters, than I am in the rest of the After Dark collection, which I would pay for if I could find in its entirety.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And now we live in a time when I regularly hear people refer to their desktop wallpaper as their "screen saver" at work. I'm occasionally tempted to point out that a static wallpaper is the complete opposite of a screen saver, but then I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).
> I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one). It's just that nobody likes being corrected. Try correcting someone's spelling or grammar on any Internet forum (including HN), and you'll be hit with a barrage of "you know what I meant" and "language changes" retorts.
> It's just that nobody likes being corrected.
Nice one.
How can the article not mention Pyro!? There was some tribal attachment to your screensaver, if I remember right, and I was on the Pyro! side... http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/02/business/the-executive-com...
The writing style of that article was excellent. No flourish, no bullshit. Also: > An aside about clocks: This is as good a time as any to reset your computer's internal clock. For I.B.M. and I.B.M.-compatible machines, type ''TIME'' at the DOS prompt, and for Macs bring up the control panel. Then call 900-410-8463. You'll get a recording from the United States Naval Observatory's atomic clock, and you can't get much…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Observator...
I ended up writing the After Dark 3.0 engine for Mac, which was a lot of fun because I wrote it as an application and then figured out how to make it run within the context of the frontmost application without affecting it. It only patched 5 system traps rather than the 20+ traps the previous engine patched.
We were in constant competition with an Apple Engineer named Tom Dowdy that had a freeware product "Dark Side of the Mac" that patched no traps at all - patching was always blamed for system instability.
It seems like so much work went into something really small... I remember countless overnights, costo runs, alcohol, and a dead hamster named Trurl.
I worked at Berkeley Systems from 1991 to 1994ish. I wasn't originally hired to work on screen savers, but as side projects failed, we all ended up doing so. (I got the job in part because I'd worked with Patrick Naughton at Sun on xlock at Sun.) I ended up writing the After Dark 3.0 engine for Mac, which was a lot of fun because I wrote it as an application and then figured out how to make it run within the context…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm less interested in Flying Toasters, than I am in the rest of the After Dark collection, which I would pay for if I could find in its entirety.
You can't. About a year ago I went looking for a big collection of at least the most popular ones, if not all of them, ready to drop $20 or so and fully expecting it to be available. They're not, so now I just have flying toasters.
I just want the "Lunatic Fringe" game back!
Edit: Looking it up, the After Dark Games version of Rodger Dodger apparently has different levels from the screensaver version! (And not just in that it added ones; in fact it has fewer in total.) That's annoying...