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Showing results for tags 'Screensaver'.
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I've been on a mission to get some of the iconic Win 3.1 through Win 98 screensavers working under WinXP. There's no practical reason to do this but who here doesn't remember 'Flying Toasters' or perhaps 'Bad dog!'? This is now effectively abandonware but everything does seem to be out there. The technical challenges are considerable -- the early modules used 16 bit calls and of course short file/folder names, 256 colors, and had no speed throttling -- they ran flat out back when a 66mHz CPU was Wow, Man! But most of that actually has been solved, hacked around, or at least recognized as "don't bother with that module." There's almost nothing (that I could find) here on MSFN. There's LOTS to be found out there if you search but close to 100% of it is rotted links. THIS is the main currently useful link elsewhere: [link to warez removed] The good news is that essentially everything is there. It's close to 400meg of stuff but nearly all the workable After Dark stuff is there, together with quite a bit of fixed software and how-to for everything through Win XP. HOWEVER: It's not exactly plug-and-play and I haven't been able to get past a problem that others have solved. One problem with the "Do these steps using this code" approach is that you don't learn very much that will help with troubleshooting. I HAVE gotten the Version 4 Plus 1 savers working. That one's easy and gives you one of the several Toaster savers, Rain Forrest, and much more. However of the Version 3 savers, only 'Starry Night' will play. I can go through the motions to install 'Voyeur' or the others (from, say, the 'Totally Twisted' disk), it shows up, you can select it in Display, but it blasts out the world's fastest moving error message when you try to start it -- only can be read by poking PrintScr: "Unable to load selected module" and the path to the Voyeur (whatever) module. I suspect that somewhere down there the code isn't able to deal with folder names containing a blank (as in 'After Dark') and that this was patched in the 'already fixed 3.2XP' saver that I installed -- but ONLY FOR 'Starry night.' Has anyone gotten other Version 3 modules to play correctly? Can someone walk me through the data structure so I could go in and manually fix the names where needed? THANKS for any help! NOTE: Purists won't want to mess with this. Like virtually all pre-Windows software, After Dark installs a bunch of stuff in the root segment on your 'C' disk and without a MAJOR code rewrite (which no one is going to do) that's not fixable. Nor are there reliable (or in many cases, ANY) uninstallers. If you want the thing out of there it's going to be a tweezers and hammer job to do it. But for the Slightly Impure, it can be fun and more or less harmless!
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Hello again! I installed one of my favourite analog clock screen savers, Analog Clock-7 from Style 7 on Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and when it was first installed, it appeared on the screensaver list, ready to activate in 15 minutes. However, when I right click on the desktop screen by clicking Personalize > Screen Saver in the Control Panel, the screen saver is set to (None) and Analog Clock-7 does not appear on the screen saver list. Analog Clock-7.scr can be found in the \System32\ and \SysWOW64\ subdirectories. When I right click on Install, the Analog Clock-7 screen saver pops up once and that's it and then it disappears again when I access the screen saver feature in the Control Panel, although the screen saver does run when when I right click Test or Configure on the Analog Clock-7.scr file. Is there any way to fix this issue of 3rd party screensavers not showing up on my 64-bit Vista installation? Update: I solved my problem by moving Analog Clock-7.scr from the \System32 and \SysWOW64\ sub-directories to the main C:\Windows directory as a workaround under a 64-bit operating system. I expect that this workaround to work in other 64-bit Windows operating systems. Did anyone have any problems getting 3rd party screensavers working under 64-bit Vista? If so, please let me know.
