After Dark Screensavers in CSS | Hacker News Reader

After Dark Screensavers in CSS

bryanbraun.com

555 pointsohjeez106 comments

After Dark (90's screensavers) in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28806699 - Oct 2021 (26 comments)

Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006679 - July 2021 (149 comments)

Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338945 - Feb 2020 (23 comments)

After Dark in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429271 - May 2017 (1 comment)

After Dark in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10935432 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)

After Dark in CSS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675287 - June 2015 (2 comments)

Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702105 - May 2014 (11 comments)

Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1338175 - May 2010 (3 comments)

After Dark now works in the browser thanks to Archive.org. Here are some examples:

Disney After Dark: https://archive.org/details/after-dark-disney

After Dark 3.2 for Windows: https://archive.org/details/AFTERDARK32_WIN

After Dark Looney Toons: https://archive.org/details/LOONEY_WIN

After Dark for Macintosh 2.0: https://archive.org/details/AfterDark_mac

After Dark Simpsons: https://archive.org/details/SIMPSONS_WIN

Thanks to a user called Noah2 and thanks to archive.org. (You can see the name of the uploader in the bottom right corner.)

Unfortunately you can be relatively sure that this kind of stuff is released without permission from the copyright holders. (Just food for thought; this is not an endorsement of copyright laws.)

https://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/afterdarkclassicset/index... – Given that Infinisys still sells After Dark (M1 ready, too!), I doubt they have approved those Archive versions.

This stuff makes me nervous about the Internet Archive. For instance, the hundreds of playable video games, all of which are also downloadable: https://archive.org/details/miscconsoles

I don't know how someone like Nintendo hasn't sued their pants off.

The Internet Archive is a "library", which, in the US, enjoy extra privileges under copyright law.

The amount of basic confusion about civics and, well, anything constitutional — something has to be done before it all withers away like waterlogged saplings in a swamp of agitation and indifference.

Yep, more details here: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

In 1997 our school class computer had three particularly fun screensavers:

- The one from Microsoft Dangerous Creatures, which would show wild animals and (if you forgot to tell it not to) also play their sounds. Fun times when you're all sitting quietly in class and suddenly the computer plays a lion roar.

- After Dark. For some reason the flying toasters were endlessly fascinating back then.

- One that was a top-down view of a soccer field with an actual simulated game being played between little AI players. I think occasionally there was even a streaker. I've never managed to find this one, does anyone know it?

> you're all sitting quietly in class and suddenly the computer plays a lion roar

INTERACTIVITY

Today, the idea of a program that intentionally makes your computer start playing loud sounds after X minutes of inactivity is ridiculous. Back then, it was also ridiculous but the world hadn't quite realised yet. We were too excited about INTERACTIVITY.

Does your phone not sporadically and infrequently beep throughout the day? Yay INTERACTIVITY

Was the last one called "Lights Out Sports Fans"? I know they had a baseball and basketball one, that did what you described. I had the baseball one.

In fact, it is kinda a funny story... I was about 10 years old, and my mom used to take me out of school every year to go to the MacWorld convention in San Francisco (just the exhibition hall).

One year I went and they had a booth for lights out sports fans screen savers, and as a prize for sitting through the demo you had a chance to win the baseball one.

Well, I sat through the demo about 5 times trying to win and never won. I would answer all the questions the demo guy would ask, and he was probably getting a little annoyed. He finally just gave me the screen saver to get me to go away.

Looks like you can buy it on eBay https://www.ebay.com/itm/202832094823

Thanks! I don't remember the name, but I bet it was, because really how many simulated sports game screensavers can there have been?

There doesn't seem to be any particular record of a soccer/football version of Lights Out Sports Fans on the Internet that I can see, but then it was a long time ago and there isn't much info on the other sports either.

Ahh that's awesome. I wished so badly I could attend MacWorld Expo back then. My parents went a couple times, but I didn't get to join. I still have some super cool swag they brought back, though, at least! Those were fun times indeed :)

It was seriously magical to me. This was like 91 to 96 or so, so the internet was just starting for the mainstream and so getting demo versions of software was really cool. We used to ride BART into the city, and then the whole BART ride back after would be me going through my bag of swag reading all the pamphlets and looking at the demo disks. Half the stuff I didn’t even know what it was yet, but it fascinated me.

My mom wasn’t into tech at all, either. She just knew I was so she found out about the conference and took me. I was so lucky.

Do you remember Johnny Castaway? That was fun! Back when I used to have some more free time I thought about implementing Nostalgic stuff like that.

I have a "partially done" ray cast 2d experiment [1] which was an attempt at wolf graphics. You could use it to recreate the "maze" one. Not sure it can be done using CSS only though.

1 - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/myRaycast

Johnny Castaway was one of the first things to cause young me to experience genuine wonder at the vast and unpredictable possibilities of computers.

Every day I'd make sure the screensaver came on just to see what he would do that particular day. I still miss that screensaver.

I spent hours watching that guy, always hoping I would see him do something new.

Why does CSS animation consume so much CPU? I've been trying to use it in my own projects, but the fans kick in even with a single simple continuous animation. Unfortunately, this (awesome!) example is no exception.

It may be an issue with your machine.

It's probably not the CPU, but the integrated GPU. Browsers are hardcoded to use that instead of the discrete GPU.

Are you running Linux or Windows? On Linux some GPU accelerated functions are disabled. chrome://gpu/ or firefox - about:support

If you're really interested you can dig into `about:tracing`. It looks like the majority of the slowdown (for what it is) is the document recalculating styles for the `transform` property.

They don't really seem to be using a lot of CPU here? I did a quick tracing of the flying toasters screensaver, and the Chrome profiler says that a random frame I picked out used:

0.23 ms in recalc style

61 µs in pre-paint

17 µs in paint

67 µs in compositing

That doesn't sound too bad to me?

I seem to remember you could alter how well done the toast was done in the preferences for flying toasters.

I'm also remembering the fish tank slowing down as more fish appeared on screen on my rather underpowered Mac IIcx back in the day :)

What no Lunatic Fringe?

The most awesome screen saver game.

Another one was Johnny Castaway, but it was not a game.

For those on Mac who want to configure these (or any web page) as your actual screensaver, you can use WebViewScreenSaver[0].

[0]: https://github.com/liquidx/webviewscreensaver

These guys sell a usable/real one https://en.infinisys.co.jp/index.shtml Flying toasters has been my default for a while. Love it.

You know what would be an interesting detail to add to sites:

The ability to designate a specific background CSS "tab-saver" such that the base bkgd css is the animation you wanted, so such as this area:

https://i.imgur.com/cZuXEq2.png

The white-space on the sides will play the css saver... but you can set each background type based on site (kind of like RES on steriods)

So that the borders show this CSS... it will allow for a super fast identification of which tab/site your on (if youre anything like me and I constantly have multiple windows, with many tabs, on multiple monitors.

It would be cool to be able to tack a background to to site groups such that the edge based animations you select could be genre specific.

Favorite sites could be "starred" and any starred site can have a set bkgd.

just to make the navigating between content/thought silos can be faster because you will see the border/bkgd in a faster mental pattern recognition than reading a URL or even a color. as we can identify different motions faster than we can other pattern recogs.

For those who saw the Flying Toasters demo and were disappointed that it didn't have the classic song, I've got you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjlusi_h_XA

... Gleaming angels of love / On mighty toaster wings!

I always liked that they had Ride Of The Valeries as an alternative. Complete with lyrics. Da da d-da daaa da...

The Warp does not have the space bar jump to hyper space, and it needs Lunatic Fringe.

Oh! Its now on Google Code... https://code.google.com/archive/p/lunatic-fringe/

Here is the game for the web: http://fringe.jamescarnley.com/

this is... not it. it's a weak replica though

Does anyone know if there is a straightforward way to implement logic for showing a screen saver like this in a basic website after X number of minutes without user interaction?

setTimeout to trigger the screensaver. Restart the timeout on mouse move.

I think starry night was my go-to, and I’m surprised to not see it here as it seems like it would be easier than a couple they did like toasters and fish.

I'd imagine Starry Night (my favorite!!) would be one of the more complicated ones? Randomly generate the buildings and then gradually draw the dots for them (with the dots eventually twinkling out, alternating)... Most of the screensavers on the site are relatively straightforward from a web/CSS perspective :)

Spotlight shows a System 7.5 desktop with “1.6GB available.”

I don’t believe you. ;)

That's Mac OS 9, not System 7.5! Almost certainly a screenshot from an emulator though.

Power Mac 9500 came with 2GB HD

haha! well, my [not-so-great] Performa 5260/120 came with a 1.2gb drive and System 7.5.3 installed, so it's definitely not implausible! In fact the PowerTower Pro 225 came with a 2gb or 8gb drive as standard (and System 7.5.3). Too lazy to search others, but yeah, by the time OS 9 came around, drives of that size were very typical.

Gosh I’m jealous. My childhood computer was an LCIII with 0.008GB of RAM. (I’m not doing the base 2 in my head. Sue me ;) )

Windows users can set any (or all!) of these as actual screensavers using this little utility I found: https://github.com/cwc/web-page-screensaver/releases

Looking back I wonder how many megawatts were wasted on screen savers and SetiAtHome in the 90s

Sadly there was (still is?) a mentality that daily turning off your computer was somehow bad for it. Considering energy consumption it always seemed crazy to me, even with a nominal increase in drive wear.

Steve Gibson still advocates never turning of spinning disks in this modern era.

A computer undergoes the most electrical stress when turning on, and doubly so for any components that also experience physical stresses such as HDDs and fans.

One of the quickest ways to kill a HDD or fan is to make it spin up its motor from idle frequently as a consequence of power saving policies.

Personally, I never turn my computers off unless I know I won't be using them for extended periods of time (say a week or two). The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life.

> The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life.

For consumer usage I find this hard to believe. I only use my laptop/desktop's spinning disks like 2h a day at most. Then there are hybrid disks or systems that are likely sleeping the disks when use is infrequent.

Let me put it this way:

I have a ~12 year old (110,651 power on hours), 500GB PATA Maxtor/Seagate HDD with 135 power cycles.

It's still alive and kicking ass as we speak.

Hmm, I think we need more evidence to decide which tradeoffs we're making. I have four 1990s drives with thousands of power cycles, still fully functional. And one more from the same time period that failed about 8 years ago.

(( Why do I have these? Well, because they're SCSI or SCSI II, which the hosts support. And because I've not bothered to replace the drives with solid-state hacks that put SD cards on the same interface. ))

In my life life of L1 tech I had replaced too many HDDs to count.

Sure, the main problem was the subpar PSUs, but are you sure what your PSU is enough?

I don’t see how that addresses the claim “The power bill savings aren't worth the decreased hardware life.”

It might even be the case that, if you bought a replacement six years ago and kept that powered on 24/7, you would have ended up paying less in (hardware+power).

Yeah, but it's one more hard drive in the trash.

Besides, it's not this hard drive anyway. At this point I want to see how long this wizard of a hard drive will keep running.

Given we're talking of After Dark times, don't forget to run park before turning the machine off :)

It was definitely worse on old hardware, and with the many old and unrefurbished computers that are likely inflicted with capacitor plague, you’re likely to blow something up if you power one up that’s been sitting idle in someone’s basement for the past couple decades.

With modern power management there’s less of a reason to power it off. S3 can power down most peripherals when they aren’t being used and draw just a few watts.

Even when shut down, the PSU still needs to consume power so it can turn on when you press the power button, keep the internal clock running, and a few other things. It’s minimal draw but it’s still using electricity. Only way to completely turn it off is by switching off the PSU (if you can) or unplugging completely.

>keep the internal clock running

That's the job of the mobo battery, the PSU just charges it as an afterthought.

The battery isn’t typically charged by the PSU — it’s often just a regular lithium coin cell. It’s a backup for when it is unplugged so the clock doesn’t reset and CMOS settings aren’t lost.

Ramp load/unload still wears it, it's the basic physics.

And the failure rate of drives with an agressive powersaving[0] says there are some truth to it.

[0] WD Green, remembrr them?

Turning on is what actually kills most hardware. So, yay…

Given the power consumption of the typical 21+ CRT monitors at the time it probably saved a whole load of power.

Not to mention, most computers at the time didn't implement any kind of idle power savings. Running a flashy screensaver didn't use any more power than sitting at the desktop.

CRTs weren't that power hungry at all. E.g., an entire 8-bit computer from 1979 (Sharp Mz-80) is rated 45W, including the CPU, the entire PCB, and its 9 inch monitor. A 21 inch Trinitron CRT monitor is rated at 1.2A (this is less than a Raspberry Pi 3; there's no Watt rating on the label, but I recall it as about 30-35W). These are actual ratings from actual equipment, I have.

In fact, early LCD monitors were (much) more power hungry. E.g., a not that early Apple Cinema HD Display from 2007 is still rated 2.05A (65W) at 20 inch and 3.7A (90W) at 23 inch. Taking the weighted average, this is double the energy consumption of the 21 inch Trinitron CRT. A modern 24 inch M1 iMac is still in about the same range as this LCD, at about 80-85W (including the CPU and PCB).

Interesting. I gave away my old monster CRT so I cannot check.

I wonder if it would be possible to buy a modern 27" or larger CRT these days; I recall that the CRTs always looked better than the LCDs when LCDs first became popular.

Ok, I just looked up the specs for the most amazing CRT, I still have around, the ultra-flat, digital 17" Apple Studio Display. (It has no label of any kind that I could find.) This one clocks in at 115W, which is not so much in line with what I commented previously. Conversely, the LCD display of the same seies is rated at just 40W at 17". However, as digital connection standards moved on, the only computer you can hook these up to is the G4 Cube.

Generally, CRTs have a sweet point at about 17 or 19 inch. Anything bigger will come at a noticeably loss of quality (due to increasing alignment problems that come with color CRTs), even for the rather expensive ones. (Even a Trinitron is not that sharp at 19" as it is at 17". And I remember a particular 24" Radius display, where you couldn't tell dithered from solid colors.) I wouldn't go above 21", unless you're specialising in large layouts and insist on doing them on a CRT. ;-)

And, as far as I know, the production of commercial CRTs stopped in the 2000s. (But you can still get them, if you're Airbus or a similar manufacturer. [2]) However, for the mere mortals…

[0] Apple Studio Display 17" CRT (Diamondtron is yet another name for Trintron after Sony's patent expired): https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...

[1] Apple Studio Display 17" LCD (not that great as a display panel, yet too early…): https://everymac.com/monitors/apple/studio_cinema/specs/appl...

[2] https://www.thomaselectronics.com/faq/

1.2A doesn't say much without knowing the voltage. If you're in the US and (this being a CRT monitor) it's running on a mains voltage of 120V, this would be 144 watts.

Assuming that P=VA that would mean that the Trinitron was using 240v x 1.2a = 288W or if on 110v 110v x 1.2a = 132W.

Raspberry Pi 3 = 5v x ~2.1a = 10.5W max.

about 350

This would be fun to add to a personal homepage (can use the Visibility API): start showing the screensaver when the user switches to another tab, and hide it/show the content again when they have a mousemove event on your site.

This just reminded me of a piece of software I haven’t thought about in many years, and I don’t know the name of it. Sometime in the mid-1990s, I have this memory of floor model PCs at retailers like CompUSA in Circuit City running a screensaver consisting of an assortment of pre-rendered, 3-D geometric eye candy. They were basically looping animated GIFs, probably 320 x 200, running full screen, and cycling through the collection at regular intervals.

Anyone else remember this?

Oh my this is bringing me back! I was providing desktop support for Cisco Systems in North Carolina in 1995 and all anybody wanted was After Dark screensavers. Messages was popular (We would often walk to a persons desk and know where they were, really helpful), as was Rainstorm.

On a related note

a collection of free screen savers for X11, macOS, iOS and Android

by Jamie Zawinski and many others.

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

Thanks for sharing, although unfortunately when visiting the link above the author has left an unfriendly message -

"HACKER NEWS - A DDoS made of finance-obsessed man-children and brogrammers"

Suppose will have to try again another time.

Lol that has been there forever. All links from HN get redirected to that page. I believe it checks HTTP_REFERER.

You have to type the url manually. That jwz is a funny guy

Is that a testicle in an egg-cup?

CSS Microsoft Bob would be fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkU4WWEUj-Y&ab_channel=LGR

UnderWare was way better https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/underware

Yeah, the ads for that always made it look wonderful! But my fam had already got original Pyro, a couple upgrades to it (colour! and fish!), and then Darkside. That last was freeware, with what seemed like loads more modules, even some third party ones and a dev kit… but nowhere near as many as what became thousands of After Dark modules (though Darkside could run some of them).

Where’s Lunatic Fringe?

I have fond memories of that as well. I think I first played it on a holiday on my dad's black and white PowerBook. Those fast enemies with the blade-like front were terrifying.

What's the spiritual successor?

My very first question! I was actually hearing that odd yell sound in my head.

Also missing Mowin’ Man and a bunch of other good ones

I never understood screensavers, I certainly remember my old CRTs in the 90s sleeping. Zero reason for the power draw when not using.

They were to prevent burn-in before monitor sleep (standby) was invented.

I don't feel like I remember having that in the 90's at all. Not on my PC running Windows 3.1, or on my Mac SE. But maybe I wouldn't use it because the CRT would take a bit of time to power back up?

Does anybody remember when monitor standby mode became widespread both on monitors and computers and OS's? My google-fu is totally failing, maybe I don't know the right search term.

Maybe my memory fails me, but I thought for sure our home PC had it. I get the reason for it prior, but I swear that was a pretty early development as the personal computer became more prevalent in the mid 90s at least.

I just looked at some Google Image searches and it seems pretty clear that, at least in software, there was "Stand By" mode in Windows 95 both when shutting down and for screen savers, but there wasn't any in Windows 3.1.

So I guess it was a mid-90's thing that it rolled out in software, although obviously you needed to upgrade to 95. No idea if hardware supported already existed or lagged behind though.

CRT monitors even after the introduction of monitor sleep still took several seconds to get up to full brightness. Better than the several minutes of ye olde CRTs, but still annoying enough to merit screensavers.

Cool! I wasn’t born when the Mackintosh was firstly published unfortunately, but these screensavers make me feel nostalgic somehow.

berkeley systems!

they had an office in downtown berkeley that featured a twisty slide that connected the first and second floors!

https://web.archive.org/web/19970625091034/http://www.berksy...

That slide was a static generator from hell. Also, when odwalla was delivered, there was quite a procession of folks to get their favorite flavors!

after dark was the best..second only to hey macaroni. next version of this needs to include bungee jumping cows

This makes me feel reeeeeeeeally old.

Makes me feel really young! Happy timetravel \(^_^)/

I love this. Recalling there was AD for Windows, DOS, and Mac Classic. I think Amiga also.

Would love a way to use any of these in Linux, especially Lunatic Fringe and Flying Toasters

XScreensaver has flying toasters at least.

https://manpages.debian.org/wheezy/xscreensaver-gl/flyingtoa...

If there's a web-enabled screensaver for your system, you could try "The Return of the Flying Toasters" [0]. It provides urls for specific configurations (just below the preferences panel) in order to work as a screensaver. Also, it's all contained in a single file.

[0] https://www.masswerk.at/flyer/

wow that sweet nostalgia, did anyone else also experience the psychedlic 'timeless' animation sequence? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAAziY-KiBQ

Ah you made me think of my favourite screensaver. It was definitely "Bis ans Ende der Welt" (Until world's end) from the German post. Watched it many hours as a youth. But I think I miss a after dark screensaver which I really liked but I can't remember which one it was

Oh I love trash!

I love it because it’s trash.

I miss the times when flying toasters where super exciting ...

dude, this almost made me cry, the nostalgia hit was strong

Nice! Great nostalgic implementation.

any ability to install these as system (macOS) screensavers?

Could look into how to show a webpage as the screensaver.

From a Google search: https://osxdaily.com/2016/06/05/web-site-as-screen-saver-mac...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com