The Best Classic Screensavers of All Time
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
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We talk so much about retro hardware, games and operating systems, but we all ran screensavers back in the day, let's show them some love! I count down my top 10 best retro screensavers of all time.
Jim Sachs Marine Aquarium: www.serenescreen.com/v2/
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
My Facebook: / danwooduk
▬ Contents of this video ▬
0:00 - Intro
1:37 - 10-2 Best Screensavers
9:05 - Squarespace Sponsor Slot
9:55 - 1 The Best Screensaver Ever
#retro #retrocomputing #retrogaming #90s #80s - Наука та технологія
Did you know the guy that made the Aquarium Screen saver, Jim Sachs, also wrote the internal graphics and user interfaces for the Amiga CDTV.
Jim Sachs also created the graphics for Defender of the Crown on the Amiga, and is the creator of possibly the most famous AGA picture, the one Commodore used to sell the A1200, with the pink flamingo and the fishes…
Amazing the talent of some people
@@paulmaggs3212 He did some graphics mate, he didn't write the Iliad.
Yes
Johnny Castaway, still has pride of place on my windows 10 rig.
My all-time favourite was SETI@Home - it searched for alien signals in chunks of radio telescope data.
i kept waiting for this to appear on the list...
having it setup in the office and making teams. it was a lot more than just a screen saver!
1:37 Flying Toasters (#10, part of After Dark series)
2:39 Space aka. Lost in Space aka. Space Exploration (#9, Windows 98 Plus pack)
3:23 3D Text (#8)
3:55 Starry Night (#7, part of After Dark series)
4:30 Mystery (#6)
5:09 3D Pipes (#5)
6:00 Maze (#4)
7:00 Matrix (#3)
7:50 SereneScreen Aquarium (#2, Windows XP Plus pack)
9:56 Johnny Castaway (#1)
They've made a comeback for me as I use an OLED for my monitor and I am paranoid about burn in :)
I remember Johnny Castaway, I used to watch it for hours back in 1994 or something. Very fun, even to this day! I wish they can make the exact same version but with better graphics.
Before I even played the video I thought "#1 has to be Johnny Castaway". Was not disappointed. That Screensaver is incredible.
1:22 with CRTs, just turning the screen dark while not actually turning off the monitor also causes cathode poisoning or cratering if you do it for prolonged periods of time. In the 80s 90s it was common for monitors to not go into standby when the screen was fully black - more modern monitors did do that.
This is why in a lab with CRT oscilloscopes, you never turn down the brightness to zero to prevent burn in of the trace, but always either turn it off, or shift the vertical position to a place where it is just outside the graticule. The burn in will happen outside of the useful image plane. Dimming the trace a bit is fine.
Of course, this is of no consequence anymore with LCD monitors.
I had no idea about cathode poisoning. Thanks! Good to know!
That was great. Spent so much time staring at screensavers back in the day.
My favorite was one made by Fujitsu, which was on all the PCs when I was working for them, that in a cartoony way showed the chip manufacturing process. I've not seen it since I left working for them in 1998, despite looking for it. Lost to the mists of time, I guess.
My favorite screensaver used to be Screen Antics Johnny Castaway. It scored 1st place here for all the reason =)
I spent hours watching it
The 3d maze could aslso be set to have colorful pulsating fractals for the walls/floor/ceiling, looking incredibly trippy.
Especially those would sap a LOT of cpu power. My little Pentium MMX laptop could not run it smoothly full screen.
#6 / Mystery is also a TERRIBLE screensaver, because it is very, very static for the most part.
#5 I still run 3d pipes on my netbook with XP running on it. It was fun to play 'spot the teapot'
#4 Maze was my default for quite a while, though I had to change those textures...
#2 The aquarium was such a relaxing one to watch. I used to leave my pc running overnight just so I could go to sleep watching it from time to time.
One of my other favorite screensavers was on the Amiga machines. I think it was just called 'snow' and it delivered what you'd expect. Snow falling from the top of the screen. Only, this one would let the snow collect on any open windows, and on your icons too. It was fun to let a bunch collect on a window and then close it to watch the snow ontop of it all fall in one heavy clump
Seems like a few of the screen savers kind of forgot what the purpose of a screen saver actually was.
My fav 90s nostalgia overload screensaver is Jamie Zawinski's XScreensaver. I love all of them.
many linux distros still come with that
@@tribemaster101 I have it on Windows. 🤣
@@legiran9564 xD jwz tried so hard to get people to stop porting it to windows due to his hateb*ner for microsoft (he was one of the netscape guys)
@@tribemaster101 I got if from screensaverplanet. I find some of the comments left there very amusing. He's basically the equivalent of taking a stand against Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich because said tyrant murdered his family and he'll never forgive him . . . while at the same time being employed by Joseph Stalin managing the extensive gulag systems in the Soviet Union that's also murdering families at a massive scale. He wants to hold a grudge for 3 decades it's his liver.
@@legiran9564 typical of them. the netscape people always try to make themselves look like saints who were bullied by Big Microsoft and it even went down as such in tech history books, when in truth they themselves were at the very top of the previous eViL web browser monopoly, EEE-ing the web standards and being unfair to other browsers. thank god microsoft shut them down
I've just noticed that the Space scene saver starfield had a stereogram (magic eye) effect which pushes the starfield into the distance when you view it in magic eye 'mode'.
I think that's just an artifact of the repeating tile background. The effect doesn't really work when all the foreground objects are 'doubled.'
Holy cow yes. Worked for me. While not all objects obviously but definitely the background.
I missed the star flight saver of Windows. I could stare long time at the ever bypassing stars like you would fly a star ship.
My favorite was the After Dark(?) screensaver that drew out the landscape of Mars and other planets in wire frame.
the aquarium one was my favorite, one of my uncles had 17 aquariums at his house, he bred tropical fish as a side line income generator.
I still love watching aquariums.
I was expecting Johnny Castaway on No. 1! Thank you!
I remember the simplest of all, the OS/2 rain drop screen saver. Mesmerising.
Loved Berkeley Systems screensavers. On the Startrek saver, an instructor from my dance studio (downtown San Francisco, Arthur Murray (lol), was the model for the dancing guy in one of the screen savers. His moment of fame! Lovely guy though.
Funny I remember and used all of them, incl. the flying toasters. What I found was that screen savers transformed from actually saving pixels/dots on your screen to entertaining progs using CPU and lighting up the same pixels for a long time.
I remember one where an engine is put together, probably my favourit one.
Some of my favorite screensavers were the ones from ReallySlick, Collomb, and Talis. There were also some amusing ones that were large demo-scene type of programs from 3PlaneSoft and others that showed scenes of ships, snowy cabins, fireplaces, and such.
Thanks for sharing
In 3d pipes very rarely you would get a teapot joint instead of a sphere
i'll 2nd your vote for Johnny Castaway, We certainly need a modern version of this one!
My favorite were the After Dark Swans. I never saw it in color as I was running it on B&W LCD Zenith laptop.
7:49 Oh the nostalgia! Not only the screensaver I ran most of all, but on the actual monitor I used! The Mitsubishi Diamond Plus! That was a beautiful monitor with just about the best image quality you could get when it was new. Way better than early LCD that's for sure. Loved it and used it until the power supply started to die. Cost a lot and weighed a ton.
Love the space screen saver and johnny cast away. Two of my faves.
Bizarrely I had heard and used them all in my time except for your number 1. Totally passed me by
The first time I saw the "Bad Dog" module for After Dark was on a Macintosh Color Classic. Now that I just got a couple of them and just got one up and running, I think I'll hunt down that module. Loved that one.
3D Pipes, After Dark, and Matrix were my jam back in the day! Good stuff, Dan!
Fun video idea Dan! I just enabled a screensaver on my desktop PC. I feel bad for kind of forgetting about screensavers. :( I also appreciate the fact that a lot of these fun screensavers have so much static imagery that causes burn-in instead of preventing it, haha.
Personally I love the one LGR discovered on a CD last year with the plane flying around, and there's now even a 4K version of it. Even so Flying Toasters holds a special place in my heart.
I clearly remember one from After Dark that was a cow making bungee jump.
Curiosity for you that likes aquariums: there was an small TV channel in São Paulo Brazil called TV A that at the end of the broadcast let a camera turned to a real aquarium all night with a text superimposed written "TV Fish" or ^"Fish TV" (in English not in Portuguese). The urban legend says it was the highest ratings of the channel (I say legend because I doubt they included those in ratings).
i'm too young to have lived through the era of screen savers, but i clearly remember the bouncy logo that was used in old dvd players
Excellent video, I'm suprised you didn't mention the "Tea Pot" elbow joints in 3D pipes. Can't remember if this was only on NT4.0 version? Think you had to set the joint option to mixed and change something else as well. But it was pretty funny at the time :)
The SereneScreen Aquarium is my all-time favorite screensaver. If you have a Roku device, you should be able to get it for your TV.
Another one I really loved was called Particle Fire.
One of our favorite savers in IT-support was the SysInternals BSOD-saver, which we might have installed on unsuspecting victi^H^H end users computers on occasion. And how can there be a mention of 3D-pipes without mentioning the teapot easter egg therein. And that in the Flying Toasters saver one could adjust the level of toastiness for the slices of bread . Yes, I am that old.
I got a chuckle out of a monty python screensaver based on silly walks.
Also, on my Linux PC I had one called galaxy (I think) and it was several swirls of pixels representing galaxies and when they collided, they would fly apart due to gravitational interference...
Galaxy is the screen saver I use. Very pretty and relaxing to watch.
Sad part about the haunted house one is I don't think it would have been an effective screensaver since it would leave the house on the screen in the same spot all the time. You may have a permanent house on your screen. Funny enough with OLED monitors screen burn-in is making a comeback. So Afterdark better get back in business. lol
I loved these! For some reason, my computer wasn't fast enough to use flying toasters, so it was one of those things that reminds me of hanging out with my best friends who probably had 4MB more RAM than I did
Nice too see the old screen savers Dan .. forgot all about them lol .
This was great! Thanks!
Great great great!!! I have been trying so remember this old software screen saver called After Dark! Thanks my friend!!
I’ve got a soft spot for Pyro! on a compact Mac… especially with the room lights turned out.
On the Unix/Linux side you had xlock (and later on xlockmore), both had many modules and by default would pick one at random. Once monitors started shutting themselves off, this kind of killed screen savers off.
Great video thanks. Reminded me of Tim's "Gareth is a Benny" screensaver on The Office :-)
If you want to run a Matrix screensaver, the best one I’ve found is “Matrixmania” as it gives options for customization (screen fill, speed, multiple colors, etc…)
The dancing Bacardi Cuba Libre screeensaver...and I can't find it anywhere, but I would love to see it again!!! I think it was dancing the Macarena....
LucasArts Star Wars screensaver for Win31 was absolutely #1 for me. Those Jawas hauling off the icons gave our family great joy!
Best screen saver I had was on xp, it was a 3d solar system fly by or a random space battle made by same developer every 5 minutes it would change to a different scene, wish I can get it back, sadly newer Windows doesn't support it, another screen saver was the gecko screen saver where geckoes ran on the screen and would chase after the mouse pointer if moved, to get out of the screen saver mode you'd press the space bar or whatever button you assigned it to. Another good one was volcano screen saver
Seti@home and thecdancing baby were my favorites
I still run a version of Flying Toasters on my IIgs. It’s glorious!
I remember many movie websites back-in-the-day would have downloadable picture slideshow screensavers with some sound effects/music/lines from the movies. I had a Lord of the Rings one I really liked. There was also the Club Nintendo screensavers of the late '00s that needed to be "purchased" with Nintendo's loyalty points, but they were really fun to look at, especially the one that stepped through Nintendo's history.
Back in win95(98 had something similar) there was a minor addon called win95 plus which added ''themes'' a full theme was background, screensaver, sound, and special mouse pointers. There was usualy was one theme for every thing you can think of.
After Dark Flight Of The Toasters was my favorite screensaver.
The Aquarium screen saver is the best. I owned a couple of Amiga's back in the day and knew Jim's work well. The best artist on the Amiga. Amazing.
No South Park screensaver?! Had that on my PC in '98. Watching Mr Hanky "fill" the screen was hilarious to me at the time! 😂
Only my opinion… Flying Toasters was shoulders above all the others in that list…
Especially the karaoke version,
“Flying out of the sun
The smell of toast is in the air,
When there's a job to be done,
The flying toasters will be there.
And it's Flap! Flap! Flap!
Now help is on the way,
This vict’ry song they sing,
We pop up to save the day,
On Mighty Toaster Wings!”
In Brightest Day or After Dark,
When times of trouble are at hand,
The Flying Toasters set a spark,
And hope is blazing cross the land!
I still use Plane9 on my main rig but in the past my favourite was System 47 Lcars. :)
Does anyone remember a "crazy apartment" screensaver from the late 80s, early 90s?! As you watched it, the lights would come on in different apartments to show you what was going on there.
Does anyone remember the screensavers (for want of a better word) that they had on the PCs in the PC world shops back in the early 90s ? From memory they were pre-rendered animations of rollercoasters or fractal zooms or sometimes just static images to demonstrate the 256 colours that could be displayed at once.
Windows 3.11 used to have a screen saver where any phrase you typed in would scroll from left to right across the screen in large letters. The school computer lab had 20 PCs, so if you set the same phrase on each, and then moved the mouse on one, waited a few seconds, moved the mouse on the next one, and so on - when the screensavers kicked in it looked like the phrase was going from one monitor to the next - going around the room. This was paticularly amusing with phrases such as "Ben smells" or "Double maths is shit".
I currently use a matrix screensaver now. I was using a flying windows one last year
I was mesmerised by that maze one as a kid
So was I... until I realized the camera is just following the right-hand rule and is completely predictable. I wish they'd given it more variety in its movements.
Mr. Bean's Mr. Bombastic Dance was my screensaver growing up
After Dark Totally Twisted - Bungee Roulette was a bit of a regular on my pc - id love to have them again running on W11 for a bit nostalgia
The Terminator 2 screensaver from the mid 90's which includes the Terminator factory was always one of my favorites.
I'm using a LG C1 OLED as my daily PC monitor so I need to adopt new working habits to stop burn in. One is to have a disappearing taskbar. But another is to have the screen turn off. I tried a screensaver but I found screensavers actually use a lot of power. The screen is on for a start when it can easily be just off. Also some of the good savers put your GPU into 3d mode instead of the idle 2d mode, which then starts up the GPU fans and the CPU goes into a heavier load than it would just sitting idle. It uses more power and heats the room up. I decided to ditch the saver idea and just have the screen turn off after 20 minutes .
I remember a screensaver playing a subtitled richard wagner's walkyries instrumental music (yeah, I said subtitled) while a bunch of manta ray passes.
How can any top ten not feature Voodoo Lights? I LOVE that one and wish it would come alive again. If I had the coding talent, I would for sure make a version/omage for Vulkan, OpenCL, DirectX 12 etc.
I remember walking past PCs whose screensaver featured these falling mahjong tiles. The tiles would often not reach the bottom but just disappear, leaving a black scar, and occasionally hit something and bounce. The hit actually had a sound. Anyone remember what this one was called?
Dan, bit of a long shot... any chance you , ravi and Joe could do a video of your top 10 retro games. Pretty confident your fan base would be up to see that video mate 😉👍
Back to the 90s I used a lot "Electric! screen saver"
Hey Dan, I remember the Serene Aquarium being a very beautiful screensaver indeed, but not a very useful one. One of my Compaq monitors in the 90s got burn in from the bottom sand.
should mention the easter egg in 3d text screensaver... i don't remember the spelling but input the word "volcanos" and the screensaver would rotate between several different volcano names
i always loved the haunted mansion screen saver even though it was slightly creepy
What makes me laugh here is that some of the screensavers on show here would do nothing to actually save your screen! Mystery and Space for example has static background images that would would burn in your screen if left on for any great length of time, making the point of the so called screen saver pointless!
No joke, I STILL run Matrix screensaver on my work PC. 😂
My favorite of all time is Mystery!
Mmm Flying Toasters! I 3D printed one out for the Christmas Tree! Nice Video Dan thanks buddy! :-)
PS. My children love the After Dark 'Totally Twisted' collection which I occasionally run for them on my vintage Mac TiBook which has survived all this time for purposes such as that. 🙂
There used to be one where a hand would pop up and you could make it “write” a custom word in the fog so it made it appear someone was stuck in the computer and was a little creepy - I can’t find it ANYWHERE?!?
That mansion is childhood!
I always kept boring screensavers at the workplace. I didn't want people to linger at my desk while I was away & risk my pen or stapler being swiped! 😊
the one at number one spot it looks awesome but i do worry that some of the screen isnt animated hence burn sort of like top half of the screen. It looks great though but that was my first thought when watching this
I vaguely remember typing Mountain or Volcano into the 3D Text screensaver and we were treated to names of Mountains.
You missed the bungie jumping cow screen saver for After Dark. 🙂
Definitely need a screensaver on oled displays
In my opinion the ultimate, very best screen saver by far is Electric Sheep. There's simply no match.
I used to have the Simpsons After Dark screen saver where Homer would munch the whole desktop.
OLED user here, screensavers are back.
Another one I enjoyed was a package from Origin Systems, before EA killed them. It had one cool feature, a "theater" which could play cinematics from most of Origin's games at the time like Wing Commander and Strike Commander. So if you had one or more other Origin games installed, you could point it at their directories and it'd play through their cutscenes.
Also, on less highbrow note, "Sheep vs Gravity" made for some goofy gory fun.
They’re definitely required for OLED now.
Unless you set the OS to make the monitor go into standby after whatever amount of idle time you choose.
I am running cmatrix on my terminal
So what's the use of a screen "saver" where 90% of its content stays static? Don't get me wrong but the main use should be to save the screen.
at that point, screen savers weren't necessary for burn in prevention any more, and were mostly a curiosity.
Cool video
how about the second nature screen savers?
You did this video and you didn't think of After Dark: Totally Twisted?? Heresy!
I havve the flying toasters on my power mac I even have the install floppys. After dark also got the simpsons looney tunes and disney add ons. There is also one called dremples and it would make your wall paper on windows xp a moving wall paper. I think it had a matching screen saver to go with it to did anyone else use this? I also believe it needed a video card and a digital monitor to.
Last year my 55" LCD began to show a ghost youtube logo in the upper left corner... it isn't lmitied to CRTs
Matrix was definitely the coolest back in the day.
Those screensavers with static elements like the number 1 in this very video kinda defeat the purpose of a screensaver don't you think? Instead of your desktop burning into your monitor the "screensaver" burns in. My choice of screensaver was to turn the monitor off, I do that to this very day.