Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS | Hacker News Reader

Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS

morphing.cloud

189 pointsNaOH59 comments

I need the Star Trek modules, which I recall waiting overnight to pirate from a BBS on my 14.4k. "Do NOT pick up the phone, mom."

Also Lunatic Fringe - somehow and for some reason a full top down space shoot-em-up in After Dark. Probably for office workers to play, I do recall there was a "boss mode" that pulled up a fake spreadsheet or something.

I need the Star Trek modules

They're there. Installable from within the program.

Dedicated Lunatic Fringe player: https://morphing.cloud/lunacy/

Did you forget to use that download protocol that lets you resume downloads or were you normal. I think it was zoom something.

it was `zmodem`:

https://b0b.com/ZMODEM.TXT

I was 10 or something, so I'm guessing I just Z...M it.

I was pretty young so I barely knew how to operate the telnet terminal - we used one called White Knight. I recall it had a white background by default (hence the name, I suppose) and a green and yellow pie chart download progress indicator.

Not sure if the protocol was available or easily enabled at the time or via those means. I surely would have used it! Buy my brother was the one who set up the application in the first place.

Everyone needs Lunatic Fringe.

I need this for Windows.

The After Dark screensavers are on the internet archive, but obviously they look and run like crap since they're made for Windows 3.x to maybe 95/98.

AFAIK there are a lot of Javascript implementations, e.g.: https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/

I appreciate the link, but as far as using it aa a screen saver, that's not what I'm looking for.

I would think if this mac After Dark project is open source, the assets would be available to use in other software.

I googled "web page as screensaver", saw results for Windows.

But I get the impression you want a ready-made solution for you, not do your own plumbing...

That would be great, of course. I have found a ready made Flying Toaster screensaver floating around and used that. But, I figured if someone had done it for Mac, surely there'd be a Windows version out there.

If After Dark was made today, would the toast/toasters have been photorealistic or some Material-design take on toast?

Photorealistic 3D models, ray traced, using a LLM reading your camera feed to determine where to put light sources in the modeled world.

But they would stutter, take ten minutes to launch and be a 25gb download.

Perfectly acceptable by modern quality standards.

The original After Dark, distributed on floppy in 1989, 1.1MB, was $110 in today's money. More than $7 per screen saver!

Of course, the target market of computer users was way smaller than it is today.

All you needed was a school district that considered it standard software for all computers. I don't know if they licensed it properly... but it was everywhere.

I need this for Wayland. Maybe when the maintainers discover that joy in computing both exists and can be a worthwhile pursuit.

bUt tHeY'Re uNnEcEsSaRy, ThInK Of tHe pOwEr cOnSuMpTiOn! FaLL iN LiNe aNd dO As yOu'rE ToLd, LiNuX Is nOt aBoUt cHoIcE

That said, XScreenSaver does work properly on Wayland now, apart from locking, but I don't need locking on my personal computer in my personal office in my personal house, so that's fine by me!

I wish someone would do this for a recently deceased OS X screen saver I loved.

Someone went through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and re-created all of the computer screens, with animation.

It was a masterpiece of mid-century design and space-age optimism.

IIRC, the author got a cease-and-desist demand, and was left to languish and die when Macs went 64-bit only.

"HAL 9000". This blog has how to do it on modern machines: https://www.fluffytech.co.uk/fluff/the-hal-project/#top

general idea, rip the 4k vids from YT and use a video screensaver app

Took a look to links from your link to get to the 4K YT. At first I wasn't that impressed until I realized it was defaulting to 480p. The 2160 stream looks amazing. Sadly, being it's a YT stream, that might be the cleanest I've seen clips from that movie. Color me impressed as I go off to find the full movie like that.

These are highly nostalgic. My grandfather had a Mac Classic he bought from a friend at work, and it was equipped with After Dark, but also the Looney Tunes sound effects pack (the only one I recall, is that it said "That's all folks" when you shut it down)

Semi-related, I redid just the other day the Flying Toasters in-browser with the full logic from the original, toast-juggler and everything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432857

Thought about doing it as a Linux screensaver, but I didn't have the patience to actually wait for the idle time, and that way I can share it with my non-Linux-using family.

jcs has this on their blog.

https://jcs.org/

If you are idle for too long, the flying toasters / screensaver kicks in.

Head's up that this adds a non-trivial amount of CPU load when the screensaver isn't running. On macOS 26, the "legacy screensaver" process takes about 30% once this is enabled [1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/vcrq7mG.png

In our age of mobile devices, especially with modern phones having always-on displays this nostalgic experience would’ve been appreciated on phones and watches. (They can even show up / start moving only after picking the device for battery concerns :) )

Anyway, the flying toasters has some meditation vibe. Even compared to screensavers back then.

Nice anecdote, With all the changes, screensavers have become less usable with screens being able to simply turn off pixels while toasters are still being used everyday.

"You can also browse and install software releases directly from the Internet Archive without leaving the app. "

That's a fine line being walked there. If they are worried about rights issues and not including the bundles, this seems like a risky FU by building this feature in directly. The part about using bundles you may have without asking questions of origin is fine. Otherwise, why not just include the bundles?

This is pretty well trod legally. By the user taking a specific action, it makes the user responsible. Comma.ai uses the same technique. Technically their self driving hardware comes with no software. You have to click a button and point it at their GitHub to get the software on it, but it's automatic after that.

I forget, doesn't Audacity also have you do this, if you want to be able to export projects as MP3?

yes, although the I recently tried doing this on a cloud Ubuntu instance, and it refused to see the .so file

We lost a Supreme Court case in 2005 on "inducement liability" (not a familiar copyright doctrine before that).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,....

I'm not sure if this doctrine has continued to be applied to anything else.

That's a good point. The other examples didn't involve copyright.

Hopefully since it's so old, the copyright holders are cool about it.

ps. Hi Seth, good to see you around!

winamp did something similar, you actually had to whip the llamas ass yourself

You must be one of those people who always downloaded the barebones version without the plugins.

From a pragmatic perspective: Berkeley Systems went through a long chain of acquisitions in the late 90s/early 2000s and eventually ended up under Vivendi, which hasn't done anything significant with the rights since a Flying Toasters themed J2ME game [1] in 2006. I doubt very much that they're going to do anything.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESZSufoTPBs

Has anyone been able to make this actually work as a macOS screensaver? I'm using Tahoe and when I go to System Settings -> Wallpapers -> Screensavers, I don't see any option to select like Afterglow or any of the wallpapers I installed.

Yes it works, but you need to enable it in the Afterglow settings first.

Go to the settings in Afterglow first and enable it. Then in Settings Wallpaper tap the 'Screen saver..' button. Select 'Custom' and then scroll and it is the last item to the right in the 'Other' section.

Satori for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8fL9lhcIC8

Anyone get this running? I installed and downloaded content but cannot figure out how to get it to appear under Screen Savers in System Settings.

You need to enable the Screen Saver module in the Afterglow settings first. Works great.

Thanks!

In screen savers, scroll to the bottom - and click on the easy to miss "Show All" on the right side. You should see Afterglow in the expanded list.

Thanks!

The thing which I kind of miss is the Stardate calendar app, which made managing class schedules more fun and less of a chore.

I get the nostalgia factor, but is it actually a good idea to use screensavers on modern monitors rather than letting them sleep?

Leaving it on all the time would probably dim the backlight eventually more than turning it off, but I’m sure the monitor could handle it. Mostly a waste of energy.

So cool! Is there any way you could make this play Johnny Castaway? I would kill for that.

Is the file on archive.org anywhere? Should be pretty straightforward to do if so

I’m surprised still that there hasn’t been a port of the classic old old Windows screensavers.

They're not as satisfying on today's high resolution displays unless you wanted to also redraw the artwork.

The source for all the OpenGL screensavers has been available for a while from an NT SDK.

I ported GL Pipes to run in Jira and show project data.

We need this for the Death Toasters from Opus 'n Bill: Brain Saver

Is there just the one Mowin' Man in More After Dark?

I want this and talking moose for Linux on Wayland.

Need this on the mini

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