Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️Remember, now is a great time to fill out your registration card.
I've long thought it would be fun to reverse engineer the After Dark API that modules use. Make a modernized version that can run on modern systems, just emulate the 16-bit x86 part using a headless QEMU or something
or a 68k emulator, since they also made a LOT of mac modules
amusingly enough time has passed that in between when After Dark Windows was released, Windows added and then removed their own screensaver functionality. So we're back to how After Dark worked, where it was a program that just idled in the background
but I'm sure it could be hacked into one of the linux screensaver frameworks without too much difficulty. JWZ probably doesn't want the Windows version in xscreensaver, but maybe the mac version would be acceptable?
anyway for now I'm looking at the windows version. I have way more experience reverse engineering windows shit
I found the After Dark 3.0 SDK!
itgrrl 
Clara “idling forward” sparks@foone 2.0u for Mac has an SDK on its floppy disk, hit up That Usual Spot for 68k Mac SW
Me 🐶@foone gotta see the tribbles screen! I had the Disney version.
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)@derrydavis @foone the sorcerer's apprentice module was great!
yakkoj 🦊@foone jwz isn't even interested in making a Wayland version of xscreensaver (after over 30 years of dealing with X, I don't blame him a bit)
@yakkoj does wayland even support screensavers? I thought the point of wayland was to drop support for anything anyone would use
@foone ha, that's closer to the truth than people want to admit!
All I could dig up on Wayland screensaver support is that they're not officially supported, and a lot of people still WANT screensavers, and of course the relevant flame threads
Peter Amstutz
Wayland and screen savers
Wayland does not support screen savers: it does not have any provision that allows screen savers to even exist in any meaningful way. If you value screen savers, that's kind of a problem. Why doesn't it? Well, I suppose the designers of Wayland have no joy in their cold, black hearts simply do not value screen savers. I suspect that some day someone will graft screen saver support onto ...
vurpo 🏳️⚧️ (2869)@foone jwz and wayland agree in that it's a bad idea to let any random application "lock" the screen by exclusively locking all input to themselves, but jwz thinks the solution is that there is only one programmer in the world who's good enough to lock your screen, while wayland thinks it's the display server's job to lock your screen rather than random user applications
tvaughan@foone jwz has an android port of his framework, so if you managed to get it working I could get after dark modules on my phone, which would be very cute.
neko68k@foone windows 11 still supports screen savers its just not exposed anywhere obvious I don't think
plinth@foone one of my co-workers at Adobe entered their contest each year. One year he did one called "DOS Shell" that imitated a person typing in DOS commands and wandering the file system. He won $10,000 and it took him all of 10 hours to write. https://tidbits.com/1992/05/04/berkeley-announces-winners/
Greg Parker@foone I have this as a perpetually-unfinished side project: enough of a 68K Mac emulator to run most Mac After Dark modules in the modern macOS screensaver.
Eskild Hustvedt@foone Yes, please!
Athena L.M.@foone ooohhhhh
Nick@foone I would love to be able to run the Star Trek screensavers on a modern system.
Souper MKC@foone can't wine run 16-bit windows programs? that'd prob work decently