A Sherman's Lagoon screensaver module for After Dark on the Macintosh
Characters and cartoons ｩ1992ﾐ1997 by Jim Toomey
Screensaver ｩ1997 by Walter S. Leipold III
(leipold@acm.org, http://www.dca.net/~leipold)
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
The minimum system for ﾒLagoonﾓ is a Macintosh with a 68020 processor, color or grayscale monitor, System 7.0, and After Dark 2.0u. The module selfishly demands 4 Mbytes of system memory, and may use a little more than that, but only while it's actually running. (And it may not need all of that -- I'm still trying to figure out what it can get away with.)
INSTALLATION
Simply drag the file ﾒLagoonﾓ into the correct After Dark subdirectory. The correct directory will vary depending on the version of After Dark you are running, but the most likely place will be the ﾒThird Party Modules" directory under ﾒAfter Dark Filesﾓ which is inside the ﾒControl Panelsﾓ folder in your "Systemﾓ folder (whew!). After you've dragged the file there, open the After Dark control panel, select ﾒThird Party Modulesﾓ from the popup menu, and choose ﾒLagoonﾓ. Click the ﾒSetupﾉﾓ button to display a configuration dialog which lets you fiddle with the number of fish displayed, whether or not comics are displayed and sounds played, and so forth.
WARNING
Please note that this is a beta version of the screensaver. It is not only missing a couple of features, but it may contain bugs (gasp!). Use it at your own risk! (No, I don't think it will cause any problems, but wouldn't want to be blamed if something happened. I use it myself, and it hasn't burned me yetﾉ)
NOTES
(1) If the animation is too slow, open the configuration dialog and reduce the number of fish displayed. I'm working on speeding it up!
(2) There are only a few cartoons included with the screensaver. The production version will have more cartoons, stored as GIF files to save space.
(3) The configuration dialog includes a 'speed' field. You can enter any number from 1 through 64 in this field. However, numbers higher than 1 result in jerky animation, so I don't recommend changing this value.
(4) The configuration dialog also includes a check box for "Clear screen?". In this version of the module, this check box has no effect. In a later version, it will cause the fish and comics to be drawn directly on your Macintosh desktop, rather than the blue background. (However, this feature will take up a lot more memory.)
MISSING FEATURES
(1) Comics in GIF (instead of PICT) format. This will allow us to store more comics in the screensaver in the same amount of disk space.
(2) Animation without clearing the screen (i.e., fish swimming over your desktop).
(3) Smoother/faster animation on slower Macintosh models.
(4) Lower memory requirements.
If find a problem with this screensaver, or if you'd like to be notified of updates, send e-mail to leipold@acm.org.
