These are the screen savers currently included in the
XScreenSaver distribution:
Abstractile
Generates mosaic patterns of interlocking tiles.
Written by Steve Sundstrom; 2004. |
|
Anemone
Wiggling tentacles.
Written by Gabriel Finch; 2002. |
|
Anemotaxis
Anemotaxis demonstrates a search algorithm designed for locating a
source of odor in turbulent atmosphere. The searcher is able to sense
the odor and determine local instantaneous wind direction. The goal is
to find the source in the shortest mean time.
Written by Eugene Balkovsky; 2004. |
|
Ant
A cellular automaton that is really a two-dimensional Turing machine:
as the heads ("ants") walk along the screen, they change pixel
values in their path. Then, as they pass over changed pixels, their
behavior is influenced.
Written by David Bagley; 1997. |
|
AntInspect
Draws a trio of ants moving their spheres around a circle.
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2004. |
|
AntMaze
Draws a few views of a few ants walking around in a simple maze.
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2005. |
|
AntSpotlight
Draws an ant (with a headlight) who walks on top of an
image of your desktop or other image.
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2003. |
|
Apollonian
Packs a large circle with smaller circles, demonstrating the
Descartes Circle Theorem.
Written by Allan R. Wilks and David Bagley; 2002. |
|
Apple ][
Simulates an original Apple ][ Plus computer in all its 1979 glory. It
also reproduces the appearance of display on a color television set of
the period.
In "Basic Programming Mode", a simulated user types in a BASIC program
and runs it. In "Text Mode", it displays the output of a program, or
the contents of a file or URL. In "Slideshow Mode", it chooses random
images and displays them within the limitations of the Apple ][
display hardware. (Six available colors in hi-res mode!)
Written by Trevor Blackwell; 2003. |
|
Atlantis
A 3D animation of a number of sharks, dolphins, and whales.
Written by Mark Kilgard; 1998. |
|
Attraction
Uses a simple simple motion model to generate many different display
modes. The control points attract each other up to a certain
distance, and then begin to repel each other. The
attraction/repulsion is proportional to the distance between any two
particles, similar to the strong and weak nuclear forces.
Written by Jamie Zawinski and John Pezaris; 1992. |
|
Atunnel
Draws an animation of a textured tunnel in GL.
Written by Eric Lassauge and Roman Podobedov; 2003. |
|
Barcode
Draws a random sequence of colorful barcodes scrolling across your
screen. CONSUME!
Written by Dan Bornstein; 2003. |
|
Blaster
Draws a simulation of flying space-combat robots (cleverly disguised
as colored circles) doing battle in front of a moving star field.
Written by Jonathan Lin; 1999. |
|
BlinkBox
Shows a ball contained inside of a bounding box.
Colored blocks blink in when the ball hits the edges.
Written by Jeremy English; 2003. |
|
BlitSpin
Repeatedly rotates a bitmap by 90 degrees by using logical operations:
the bitmap is divided into quadrants, and the quadrants are shifted
clockwise. Then the same thing is done again with progressively
smaller quadrants, except that all sub-quadrants of a given size are
rotated in parallel. As you watch it, the image appears to dissolve
into static and then reconstitute itself, but rotated.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
BlockTube
Draws a swirling, falling tunnel of reflective slabs. They fade from
hue to hue.
Written by Lars R. Damerow; 2003. |
|
Boing
This bouncing ball is a clone of the first graphics demo for the Amiga
1000, which was written by Dale Luck and RJ Mical during a break at
the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (or so the legend goes.)
This looks like the original Amiga demo if you turn off "smoothing"
and "lighting" and turn on "scanlines".
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2005. |
|
Bouboule
This draws what looks like a spinning, deforming balloon with
varying-sized spots painted on its invisible surface.
Written by Jeremie Petit; 1997. |
|
BouncingCow
A Cow. A Trampoline. Together, they fight crime.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2003. |
|
Boxed
Draws a box full of 3D bouncing balls that explode.
Written by Sander van Grieken; 2002. |
|
BoxFit
Packs the screen with growing squares or circles, colored according to a
horizontal or vertical gradient, or according to the colors of the
desktop or a loaded image file. The objects grow until they touch,
then stop. When the screen is full, they shrink away and the process
restarts.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2005. |
|
Braid
Draws random color-cycling inter-braided concentric circles.
Written by John Neil; 1997. |
|
BSOD
BSOD stands for "Blue Screen of Death". The finest in personal
computer emulation, this program simulates popular screen savers from a
number of less robust operating systems.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
|
Bubble3D
Draws a stream of rising, undulating 3D bubbles, rising toward the
top of the screen, with transparency and specular reflections.
Written by Richard Jones; 1998. |
|
Bubbles
This simulates the kind of bubble formation that happens when water
boils:small bubbles appear, and as they get closer to each other,
they combine to form larger bubbles, which eventually pop.
Written by James Macnicol; 1996. |
|
Bumps
A spotlight roams across an embossed version of your desktop or
other picture.
Written by Shane Smit; 1999. |
|
Cage
This draws Escher's "Impossible Cage", a 3d analog of a moebius
strip, and rotates it in three dimensions.
Written by Marcelo Vianna; 1998. |
|
Carousel
Loads several random images, and displays them flying in a circular
formation. The formation changes speed and direction randomly, and
images periodically drop out to be replaced by new ones.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2005. |
|
C Curve
Generates self-similar linear fractals, including the classic "C Curve".
Written by Rick Campbell; 1999. |
|
Celtic
Repeatedly draws random Celtic cross-stitch patterns.
Written by Max Froumentin; 2005. |
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Circuit
Animates a number of 3D electronic components.
Written by Ben Buxton; 2001. |
|
CloudLife
Generates cloud-like formations based on a variant of Conway's Life. The
difference is that cells have a maximum age, after which they count as
3 for populating the next generation. This makes long-lived formations
explode instead of just sitting there.
Written by Don Marti; 2003. |
|
Compass
This draws a compass, with all elements spinning about randomly, for
that "lost and nauseous" feeling.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
|
Coral
Simulates coral growth, albeit somewhat slowly.
Written by Frederick Roeber; 1997. |
|
Crackberg
Flies through height maps, optionally animating the creation and
destruction of generated tiles; tiles `grow' into place.
Written by Matus Telgarsky; 2005. |
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Critical
Draws a system of self-organizing lines. It starts out as random
squiggles, but after a few iterations, order begins to appear.
Written by Martin Pool; 1999. |
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Crystal
Moving polygons, similar to a kaleidescope (more like a kaleidescope
than the one called `kaleid,' actually).
Written by Jouk Jansen; 1998. |
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Cube 21
Animates a Rubik-like puzzle known as Cube 21 or Square-1.
The rotations are chosen randomly.
Written by Vasek Potocek; 2005. |
|
Cubenetic
Draws a pulsating set of overlapping boxes with ever-chaning blobby
patterns undulating across their surfaces. It's sort of a cubist Lavalite.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2002. |
|
CubeStorm
Draws a series of rotating 3D boxes that intersect each other and
eventually fill space.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2003. |
|
CubicGrid
Draws the view of an observer located inside a rotating 3D lattice of colored
points.
Written by Vasek Potocek; 2007. |
|
CWaves
This generates a languidly-scrolling vertical field of sinusoidal colors.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2007. |
|
Cynosure
Random dropshadowed rectangles pop onto the screen in lockstep.
Written by Ozymandias G. Desiderata, Jamie Zawinski, and Stephen Linhart; 1998. |
|
DangerBall
Draws a ball that periodically extrudes many random spikes. Ouch!
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2001. |
|
DecayScreen
This takes an image and makes it melt. You've no doubt seen this
effect before, but no screensaver would really be complete without it.
It works best if there's something colorful visible. Warning, if the
effect continues after the screen saver is off, seek medical attention.
Written by David Wald, Vivek Khera, Jamie Zawinski, and Vince Levey; 1993. |
|
Deco
Subdivides and colors rectangles randomly. It looks kind of
like Brady-Bunch-era rec-room wall paneling.
Written by Jamie Zawinski and Michael Bayne; 1997. |
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Deluxe
Draws a pulsing sequence of transparent stars, circles, and lines.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
|
Demon
A cellular automaton that starts with a random field, and organizes
it into stripes and spirals.
Written by David Bagley; 1999. |
|
Discrete
More "discrete map" systems, including new variants of Hopalong and
Julia, and a few others.
Written by Tim Auckland; 1998. |
|
Distort
Grabs an image of the screen, and then lets a transparent
lens wander around the screen, magnifying whatever is underneath.
Written by Jonas Munsin; 1998. |
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Drift
Drifting recursive fractal cosmic flames.
Written by Scott Draves; 1997. |
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Endgame
Black slips out of three mating nets, but the fourth one holds him tight!
A brilliant composition!
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2002. |
|
Engine
Draws a simple model of an engine that floats around the screen.
Written by Ben Buxton and Ed Beroset; 2001. |
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Epicycle
This program draws the path traced out by a point on the edge of a
circle. That circle rotates around a point on the rim of another
circle, and so on, several times. These were the basis for the
pre-heliocentric model of planetary motion.
Written by James Youngman; 1998. |
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Eruption
Exploding fireworks.
Written by W.P. van Paassen; 2003. |
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Euler2d
Simulates two dimensional Incompressible Inviscid Fluid Flow.
Written by Stephen Montgomery-Smith; 2002. |
|
Extrusion
Draws various rotating extruded shapes that twist around, lengthen,
and turn inside out.
Written by Linas Vepstas, David Konerding, and Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
|
FadePlot
Draws what looks like a waving ribbon following a sinusoidal path.
Written by Bas van Gaalen and Charles Vidal; 1997. |
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Fiberlamp
Draws a groovy rotating fiber optic lamp.
Written by Tim Auckland; 2005. |
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Fireworkx
Exploding fireworks.
Written by Rony B Chandran; 2004. |
|
Flag
This draws a waving colored flag, that undulates its way around the
screen. The trick is the flag can contain arbitrary text and images.
By default, it displays either the current system name and OS
type, or a picture of "Bob".
Written by Charles Vidal and Jamie Zawinski; 1997. |
|
Flame
Iterative fractals.
Written by Scott Draves; 1993. |
|
FlipFlop
Draws a grid of 3D colored tiles that change positions with each other.
Written by Kevin Ogden and Sergio Gutierrez; 2003. |
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Flipscreen3d
Grabs an image of the desktop, turns it into a GL texture map, and
spins it around and deforms it in various ways.
Written by Ben Buxton and Jamie Zawinski; 2001. |
|
FlipText
Draws successive pages of text. The lines flip in and out in
a soothing 3D pattern.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2005. |
|
Flow
Strange attractors formed of flows in a 3D differential equation phase space.
Written by Tim Auckland; 1998. |
|
FluidBalls
Models the physics of bouncing balls, or of particles in a gas or
fluid, depending on the settings. If "Shake Box" is selected, then
every now and then, the box will be rotated, changing which direction
is down (in order to keep the settled balls in motion.)
Written by Peter Birtles and Jamie Zawinski; 2002. |
|
Flurry
This X11 port of the OSX screensaver of the same name draws a colourful
star(fish)like flurry of particles.
Original Mac version: http://homepage.mac.com/calumr
Written by Calum Robinson and Tobias Sargeant; 2002. |
|
Flying Toasters
A fleet of 3d space-age jet-powered flying toasters (and toast!)
Inspired by the ancient Berkeley Systems After Dark flying toasters.
Written by Jamie Zawinski and Baconmonkey; 2003. |
|
FontGlide
Puts text on the screen using large characters that glide in from the
edges, assemble, then disperse. Alternately, it can simply scroll whole
sentences from right to left.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2003. |
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Forest
Fractal trees.
Written by Peter Baumung; 1997. |
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FuzzyFlakes
Falling colored snowflake/flower shapes.
Written by Barry Dmytro; 2004. |
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Galaxy
This draws spinning galaxies, which then collide and scatter their
stars to the, uh, four winds or something.
Written by Uli Siegmund, Harald Backert, and Hubert Feyrer; 1997. |
|
Gears
This draws sets of turning, interlocking gears, rotating in three
dimensions.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2007. |
|
GFlux
Draws a rippling waves on a rotating wireframe grid.
Written by Josiah Pease; 2000. |
|
GLBlur
This program draws a box and a few line segments, and generates a
radial blur outward from it. This creates flowing field effects.
This is done by rendering the scene into a small texture, then
repeatedly rendering increasingly-enlarged and increasingly-transparent
versions of that texture onto the frame buffer. As such, it's quite
graphics intensive: don't bother trying to run this if you don't have
hardware-accelerated OpenGL texture support. It will hurt your
machine bad.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2002. |
|
GLCells
Cells growing, dividing and dying on your screen.
Written by Matthias Toussaint; 2007. |
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Gleidescope
A kaleidescope that operates on your desktop image, or on
image files loaded from disk.
Written by Andrew Dean; 2003. |
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GLForestFire
Draws an animation of sprinkling fire-like 3D triangles in a landscape
filled with trees.
Written by Eric Lassauge; 2002. |
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GLHanoi
Solves the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Move N disks from one pole to
another, one disk at a time, with no disk ever resting on a disk
smaller than itself.
Written by Dave Atkinson; 2005. |
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GLKnots
Generates some twisting 3d knot patterns. Spins 'em around.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2003. |
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GLMatrix
Draws 3D dropping characters similar to what is seen in the title sequence
of "The Matrix".
See also "xmatrix" for a 2D rendering of the similar effect that
appeared on the computer monitors actually *in* the movie.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2003. |
|
GLPlanet
Draws a planet bouncing around in space.
The built-in image is a map of the earth (extracted from `xearth'),
but you can wrap any texture around the sphere, e.g., the planetary
textures that come with `ssystem'.
Written by David Konerding; 1998. |
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glschool
Uses Craig Reynolds' Boids algorithm to simulate a school of fish.
Looks best with more fish, so raise the number of fish until the
frame rate declines to 25-30 fps.
Written by David C. Lambert; 2006. |
|
GLSlideshow
Loads a random sequence of images and smoothly scans and zooms around
in each, fading from pan to pan.
Written by Jamie Zawinski and Mike Oliphant; 2003. |
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GlSnake
Draws a simulation of the Rubik's Snake puzzle.
Written by Jamie Wilkinson, Andrew Bennetts, and Peter Aylett; 2002. |
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GLText
Displays a few lines of text spinning around in a solid 3D font.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2001. |
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Goop
This draws set of animating, transparent, amoeba-like blobs. The blobs
change shape as they wander around the screen, and they are translucent,
so you can see the lower blobs through the higher ones, and when one
passes over another, their colors merge. I got the idea for this from
a cool mouse pad I have, which achieves the same kind of effect in real
life by having several layers of plastic with colored oil between them.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1997. |
|
Grav
This program draws a simple orbital simulation. If you turn on
trails, it looks kind of like a cloud-chamber photograph.
Written by Greg Bowering; 1997. |
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Greynetic
Draws random colored, stippled and transparent rectangles.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
Halftone
Draws the gravity force in each point on the screen seen through a
halftone dot pattern. The gravity force is calculated from a set of
moving mass points. View it from a distance for best effect.
Written by Peter Jaric; 2002. |
|
Halo
Draws trippy psychedelic circular patterns that hurt to look at.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1993. |
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Helix
Spirally string-art-ish patterns.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
Hopalong
This draws lacy fractal patterns, based on iteration in the imaginary
plane, from a 1986 Scientific American article.
Written by Patrick Naughton; 1992. |
|
Hyperball
Hyperball is to hypercube as dodecahedron is to cube: this displays
a 2D projection of the sequence of 3D objects which are the projections
of the 4D analog to the dodecahedron. Technically, it is a "120 cell
polytope".
See also "polytopes" for a more general version of this using OpenGL.
Written by Joe Keane; 2000. |
|
Hypercube
This displays 2D projections of the sequence of 3D objects which are
the projections of the 4D analog to the cube: as a square is composed
of four lines, each touching two others; and a cube is composed of
six squares, each touching four others; a hypercube is composed of
eight cubes, each touching six others. To make it easier to
visualize the rotation, it uses a different color for the edges of
each face. Don't think about it too long, or your brain will melt.
See also "polytopes" for a more general version of this using OpenGL.
Written by Joe Keane, Fritz Mueller, and Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
Hypertorus
This program shows a rotating Clifford Torus: a torus lying on the
"surface" of a 4D hypersphere. Inspired by Thomas Banchoff's book
"Beyond the Third Dimension: Geometry, Computer Graphics, and Higher
Dimensions", Scientific American Library, 1990.
Written by Carsten Steger; 2003. |
|
Hypnowheel
Draws a series of overlapping, translucent spiral patterns.
The tightness of their spirals fluctuates in and out.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2008. |
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IFS
This one draws spinning, colliding iterated-function-system images.
Note that the "Detail" parameter is exponential. Number of points
drawn is functions^detail.
Written by Chris Le Sueur and Robby Griffin; 1997. |
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IMSmap
This generates random cloud-like patterns. The idea is to take four
points on the edge of the image, and assign each a random "elevation".
Then find the point between them, and give it a value which is the
average of the other four, plus some small random offset.
Coloration is done based on elevation.
Written by Juergen Nickelsen and Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
Interaggregate
A surface is filled with a hundred medium to small sized circles.
Each circle has a different size and direction, but moves at the same
slow rate. Displays the instantaneous intersections of the circles as
well as the aggregate intersections of the circles.
Though actually it doesn't look like circles at all!
Written by Casey Reas, William Ngan, Robert Hodgin, and Jamie Zawinski; 2004. |
|
Interference
Color field based on computing decaying sinusoidal waves.
Written by Hannu Mallat; 1998. |
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Intermomentary
A surface is filled with a hundred medium to small sized circles.
Each circle has a different size and direction, but moves at the same
slow rate. Displays the instantaneous intersections of the circles as
well as the aggregate intersections of the circles.
The circles begin with a radius of 1 pixel and slowly increase to some
arbitrary size. Circles are drawn with small moving points along the
perimeter. The intersections are rendered as glowing orbs. Glowing
orbs are rendered only when a perimeter point moves past the
intersection point.
Written by Casey Reas, William Ngan, Robert Hodgin, and Jamie Zawinski; 2004. |
|
JigglyPuff
This does bad things with quasi-spherical objects.
You have a tetrahedron with tesselated faces. The vertices on these
faces have forces on them: one proportional to the distance from the
surface of a sphere; and one proportional to the distance from the
neighbors. They also have inertia.
The resulting effect can range from a shape that does nothing, to a
frenetic polygon storm. Somewhere in between there it usually
manifests as a blob that jiggles in a kind of disturbing manner.
Written by Keith Macleod; 2003. |
|
Jigsaw
This grabs a screen image, carves it up into a jigsaw puzzle,
shuffles it, and then solves the puzzle. This works especially well
when you feed it an external video signal instead of letting it grab
the screen image (actually, I guess this is generally true...) When
it is grabbing a video image, it is sometimes pretty hard to guess
what the image is going to look like once the puzzle is solved.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
|
Juggle
Draws a juggling stick-man. See also "Juggle3D".
Written by Tim Auckland; 2002. |
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Juggler3D
3D simulation of a juggler performing with balls, clubs and rings.
Written by Brian Apps; 2005. |
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Julia
Animates the Julia set (a close relative of the Mandelbrot set). The
small moving dot indicates the control point from which the rest of
the image was generated.
Written by Sean McCullough; 1997. |
|
Kaleidescope
A simple kaleidoscope. See also "gleidescope".
Written by Ron Tapia; 1997. |
|
Klein
This draws a visualization of a Klein bottle or some other interesting
parametric surfaces.
Written by Andrey Mirtchovski; 2003. |
|
Kumppa
Spiraling, spinning, and very, very fast splashes of color rush
toward the screen.
Written by Teemu Suutari; 1998. |
|
Lament
Animates a simulation of Lemarchand's Box, the Lament Configuration,
repeatedly solving itself. Warning: occasionally opens doors.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
|
Laser
Moving radiating lines, that look vaguely like scanning laser beams.
(Frankie say: relax.)
Written by Pascal Pensa; 1997. |
|
LavaLite
Draws a 3D Simulation a Lava Lite(r): odd-shaped blobs of a mysterious
substance are heated, slowly rise to the top of the bottle, and then
drop back down as they cool. This program requires a fairly fast
machine (both CPU and 3D performance.)
"LAVA LITE(r) and the configuration of the LAVA(r) brand motion lamp are
registered trademarks of Haggerty Enterprises, Inc. The configuration
of the globe and base of the motion lamp are registered trademarks of
Haggerty Enterprises, Inc. in the U.S.A. and in other countries around
the world."
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2002. |
|
LCDscrub
This screen saver is not meant to look pretty, but rather, to
repair burn-in on LCD monitors.
Believe it or not, screen burn is not a thing of the past.
It can happen to LCD screens pretty easily, even in this modern age.
However, leaving the screen on and displaying high contrast images
can often repair the damage. That's what this screen saver does.
See also:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88343
http://toastycode.com/blog/2008/02/05/lcd-scrub/
Inspired by the like-named program by Daniel Sandler.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2008. |
|
Lightning
Crackling fractal lightning bolts.
Written by Keith Romberg; 1997. |
|
Lisa
Lisajous loops.
Written by Caleb Cullen; 1997. |
|
Lissie
This one draws the progress of circular shapes along a path.
Written by Alexander Jolk; 1997. |
|
LMorph
This generates random spline-ish line drawings and morphs between
them.
Written by Sverre H. Huseby and Glenn T. Lines; 1995. |
|
Lockward
A translucent spinning, blinking thing. Sort of a cross between the wards
in an old combination lock and those old backlit information displays that
animated and changed color via polarized light.
Written by Leo L. Schwab; August, 2007. |
|
Loop
Generates loop-shaped colonies that spawn, age, and eventually die.
Written by David Bagley; 1999. |
|
M6502
The m6502 screensaver emulates a 6502 microprocessor. The family
of 6502 chips were used throughout the 70's and 80's in machines
such as the Atari 2600, Commodore PET, VIC20 and C64, Apple ][,
and the NES. Some example programs are included, and it can also
read in an assembly file as input.
Original JavaScript Version by Stian Soreng: http://www.6502asm.com/.
Ported to XScreenSaver by Jeremy English.
Written by Stian Soreng and Jeremy English; 2007. |
|
Maze
This generates random mazes (with various different algorithms), and
then solves them. Backtracking and look-ahead paths are displayed in
different colors.
Written by Jim Randell and many others; 1992. |
|
MemScroller
This draws a dump of its own process memory scrolling across the screen
in three windows at three different rates.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2004. |
|
Menger
This draws the three-dimensional variant of the recursive Menger
Gasket, a cube-based fractal object analagous to the Sierpinski
Tetrahedron.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2001. |
|
MetaBalls
Draws two dimensional metaballs: overlapping and merging balls with
fuzzy edges.
Written by W.P. van Paassen; 2003. |
|
MirrorBlob
Draws a wobbly blob that distorts the image behind it.
Requires OpenGL hardware acceleration for nice animation.
Written by Jon Dowdall; 2003. |
|
Mismunch
Munching errors! This is a creatively broken misimplementation of the
classic munching squares graphics hack.
Written by Steven Hazel; 2004. |
|
Moebius
This animates a 3D rendition M.C. Escher's "Moebius Strip II",
an image of ants walking along the surface of a moebius strip.
Written by Marcelo F. Vianna; 1997. |
|
MoebiusGears
Draws a closed, interlinked chain of rotating gears. The layout of
the gears follows the path of a moebius strip.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2007. |
|
Moiré
When the lines on the screen
Make more lines in between,
That's a moiré!
Written by Jamie Zawinski and Michael Bayne; 1997. |
|
Moiré2
Generates fields of concentric circles or ovals, and combines the
planes with various operations. The planes are moving independently
of one another, causing the interference lines to spray.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
|
Molecule
Draws several different representations of molecules. Some common
molecules are built in, and it can also read PDB (Protein Data Base)
files as input.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2001. |
|
Morph3D
Platonic solids that turn inside out and get spikey.
Written by Marcelo Vianna; 1997. |
|
Mountain
Generates random 3d plots that look vaguely mountainous.
Written by Pascal Pensa; 1997. |
|
Munch
DATAI 2
ADDB 1,2
ROTC 2,-22
XOR 1,2
JRST .-4
As reported by HAKMEM, in 1962, Jackson Wright wrote the above PDP-1
code. That code still lives on in this program, some 44 years
later. The number of lines of enclosing code has increased
substantially, however.
Written by Jackson Wright and Tim Showalter; 1997. |
|
NerveRot
Draws different shapes composed of nervously vibrating squiggles,
as if seen through a camera operated by a monkey on crack.
Written by Dan Bornstein; 2000. |
|
Noof
Draws some rotatey patterns, using OpenGL.
Written by Bill Torzewski; 2004. |
|
Noseguy
A little man with a big nose wanders around your screen saying things.
Written by Dan Heller and Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
|
Pacman
Simulates a game of Pac-Man on a randomly-created level.
Written by Edwin de Jong; 2004. |
|
Pedal
This is sort of a combination spirograph/string-art. It generates a
large, complex polygon, and renders it by filling using an even/odd
winding rule.
Written by Dale Moore; 1995. |
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Penetrate
Simulates the classic arcade game Missile Command.
Written by Adam Miller; 1999. |
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Penrose
Draws quasiperiodic tilings; think of the implications on modern
formica technology.
In April 1997, Sir Roger Penrose, a British math professor who has
worked with Stephen Hawking on such topics as relativity, black
holes, and whether time has a beginning, filed a
copyright-infringement lawsuit against the Kimberly-Clark
Corporation, which Penrose said copied a pattern he created (a
pattern demonstrating that "a nonrepeating pattern could exist in
nature") for its Kleenex quilted toilet paper. Penrose said he
doesn't like litigation but, "When it comes to the population of
Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms
on what appears to be the work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last
stand must be taken."
As reported by News of the Weird #491, 4-jul-1997.
Written by Timo Korvola; 1997. |
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Petri
This simulates colonies of mold growing in a petri dish. Growing
colored circles overlap and leave spiral interference in their wake.
Written by Dan Bornstein; 1999. |
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Phosphor
Draws a simulation of an old terminal, with large pixels and
long-sustain phosphor. This program is also a fully-functional VT100
emulator!
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
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Piecewise
This draws a bunch of moving circles which switch from visibility to
invisibility at intersection points.
Written by Geoffrey Irving; 2003. |
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Pinion
Draws an interconnected set of gears moving across the screen.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2004. |
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Pipes
A growing plumbing system, with bolts and valves.
Written by Marcelo Vianna; 1997. |
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Polyhedra
Displays different 3D solids and some information about each.
A new solid is chosen every few seconds. There are 75 uniform
polyhedra, plus 5 infinite sets of prisms and antiprisms;
including their duals brings the total to 160.
Written by Dr. Zvi Har'El and Jamie Zawinski; 2004. |
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Polyominoes
Repeatedly attempts to completely fill a rectangle with
irregularly-shaped puzzle pieces.
Written by Stephen Montgomery-Smith; 2002. |
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Regular 4D Polytopes
This program shows one of the six regular 4D polytopes rotating in 4D.
Inspired by H.S.M Coxeter's book "Regular Polytopes", 3rd Edition,
Dover Publications, Inc., 1973, and Thomas Banchoff's book "Beyond the
Third Dimension: Geometry, Computer Graphics, and Higher Dimensions",
Scientific American Library, 1990.
Written by Carsten Steger; 2003. |
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Pong
The pong program simulates an ancient Pong home video game, as well as
various artifacts from displaying it on a color TV set.
In clock mode, the score keeps track of the current time.
Written by Jeremy English and Trevor Blackwell; 2003. |
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popsquares
This draws a pop-art-ish looking grid of pulsing colors.
Written by Levi Burton; 2003. |
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Providence
The providence code displays an eye, shrouded in glory, set upon the
base of a pyramid.
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2004. |
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Pulsar
Draws some intersecting planes, making use of alpha blending, fog,
textures, and mipmaps.
Written by David Konerding; 1999. |
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Pyro
Pyro draws exploding fireworks. Blah blah blah.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
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Qix
Bounces a series of line segments around the screen, and uses
variations on this basic motion pattern to produce all sorts of
different presentations: line segments, filled polygons, and
overlapping translucent areas.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
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Queens
Solves the N-Queens problem (where, in this program, N is between 5 and
10 queens.) The problem is: how may one place N queens on an NxN
chessboard such that no queen can attack a sister?
Written by Blair Tennessy; 2002. |
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RD-Bomb
Draws a grid of growing square-like shapes that, once they overtake
each other, react in unpredictable ways. "RD" stands for
reaction-diffusion.
Written by Scott Draves. |
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Ripples
This draws rippling interference patterns like splashing water.
With the -water option, it manipulates your desktop image to look
like something is dripping into it.
Written by Tom Hammersley; 1999. |
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Rocks
This draws an animation of flight through an asteroid field, with
changes in rotation and direction.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
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Rorschach
This generates random inkblot patterns via a reflected random walk.
Any deep-seated neurotic tendencies which this program reveals
are your own problem.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1992. |
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Rotor
Draws a line segment moving along a complex spiraling curve.
Written by Tom Lawrence; 1997. |
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RotZoomer
Creates a collage of rotated and scaled portions of the screen.
Written by Claudio Matsuoka; 2001. |
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Rubik
Draws a Rubik's Cube that rotates in three dimensions and repeatedly
shuffles and solves itself.
Written by Marcelo Vianna; 1997. |
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Sballs
Draws an animation of textured balls spinning like crazy.
Written by Eric Lassauge; 2002. |
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ShadeBobs
This draws smoothly-shaded oscillating oval patterns, that look
something like vapor trails or neon tubes.
Written by Shane Smit; 1999. |
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Sierpinski
This draws the two-dimensional variant of the recursive Sierpinski
triangle fractal.
Written by Desmond Daignault; 1997. |
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Sierpinski3D
This draws the three-dimensional variant of the recursive Sierpinski
triangle fractal, using GL.
Written by Tim Robinson and Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
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SlideScreen
This takes an image, divides it into a grid, and then randomly shuffles
the squares around as if it was one of those annoying "16-puzzle"
games, where there is a grid of squares, one of which is missing.
I hate trying to solve those puzzles, but watching one permute itself
is more amusing.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1994. |
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Slip
This program throws some random bits on the screen, then sucks them
through a jet engine and spews them out the other side. To avoid
turning the image completely to mush, every now and then it will it
interject some splashes of color into the scene, or go into a spin
cycle, or stretch the image like taffy.
Written by Scott Draves and Jamie Zawinski; 1997. |
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Sonar
This program draws a sonar screen that pings (get it?) the hosts on
your local network, and plots their distance (response time) from you.
The three rings represent ping times of approximately 2.5, 70 and 2,000
milliseconds respectively.
Alternately, it can run a simulation that doesn't involve hosts.
(If pinging doesn't work, you may need to make the executable be setuid.)
Written by Stephen Martin and Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
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SpeedMine
Simulates speeding down a rocky mineshaft, or a funky dancing worm.
Written by Conrad Parker; 2001. |
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Sphere
Draws shaded spheres in multiple colors.
Written by Tom Duff and Jamie Zawinski; 1982, 1997. |
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Spheremonics
These closed objects are commonly called spherical harmonics,
although they are only remotely related to the mathematical
definition found in the solution to certain wave functions, most
notable the eigenfunctions of angular momentum operators.
Written by Paul Bourke and Jamie Zawinski; 2002. |
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Spiral
Moving circular moiré patterns.
Written by Peter Schmitzberger; 1997. |
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Spotlight
Draws a spotlight scanning across a black screen, illuminating the
underlying desktop (or a picture) when it passes.
Written by Rick Schultz and Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
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Sproingies
Q-Bert meets Marble Madness!
Written by Ed Mackey; 1997. |
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Squiral
Draws a set of interacting, square-spiral-producing automata. The
spirals grow outward until they hit something, then they go around it.
Written by Jeff Epler; 1999. |
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Stairs
Escher's infinite staircase.
Written by Marcelo Vianna; 1998. |
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Starfish
This generates a sequence of undulating, throbbing, star-like
patterns which pulsate, rotate, and turn inside out. Another display
mode uses these shapes to lay down a field of colors, which are then
cycled. The motion is very organic.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1997. |
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StarWars
Draws a stream of text slowly scrolling into the distance at an
angle, over a star field, like at the beginning of the movie of the
same name.
Written by Jamie Zawinski and Claudio Matauoka; 2001. |
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StonerView
Chains of colorful squares dance around each other in complex spiral
patterns. Inspired by SGI's `electropaint' screensaver.
Written by Andrew Plotkin; 2001. |
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Strange
This draws strange attractors: it's a colorful,
unpredictably-animating field of dots that swoops and twists around.
Written by Massimino Pascal; 1997. |
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Substrate
Lines like crystals grow on a computational substrate. A simple
perpendicular growth rule creates intricate city-like structures.
Written by J. Tarbell and Mike Kershaw; 2004. |
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Superquadrics
Morphing 3D shapes.
Written by Ed Mackey; 1987, 1997. |
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Swirl
Flowing, swirly patterns.
Written by M. Dobie and R. Taylor; 1997. |
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T3D
Draws a working analog clock composed of floating, throbbing bubbles.
Written by Bernd Paysan; 1999. |
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Tangram
Solves tangram puzzles.
Written by Jeremy English; 2005. |
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Thornbird
Displays a view of the "Bird in a Thornbush" fractal.
Written by Tim Auckland; 2002. |
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Timetunnel
Draws an animation similar to the opening and closing effects on the
Dr. Who TV show.
Written by Sean P. Brennan; 2005. |
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topBlock
Creates a 3D world with dropping blocks that build up and up.
Written by rednuht; 2006. |
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Triangle
Generates random mountain ranges using iterative subdivision of
triangles.
Written by Tobias Gloth; 1997. |
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Truchet
This draws line- and arc-based truchet patterns that tile the screen.
Written by Adrian Likins; 1998. |
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Twang
Divides the screen into a grid, and plucks them.
Written by Dan Bornstein; 2002. |
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Vermiculate
Draws squiggly worm-like paths.
Written by Tyler Pierce; 2001. |
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VidWhacker
This is a shell script that grabs a frame of video from the system's
video input, and then uses some PBM filters (chosen at random) to
manipulate and recombine the video frame in various ways (edge
detection, subtracting the image from a rotated version of itself,
etc.) Then it displays that image for a few seconds, and does it
again. This works really well if you just feed broadcast television
into it.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1998. |
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Vines
Generates a continuous sequence of small, curvy geometric patterns.
Written by Tracy Camp and David Hansen; 1997. |
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Voronoi
Draws a randomly-colored Voronoi tessellation, and periodically zooms
in and adds new points. The existing points also wander around.
There are a set of control points on the plane, each at the center of
a colored cell. Every pixel within that cell is closer to that cell's
control point than to any other control point. That is what
determines the cell's shapes.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 2007. |
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Wander
Draws a colorful random-walk, in various forms.
Written by Rick Campbell; 1999. |
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WebCollage
This program makes collages out of random images pulled off of the
World Wide Web. It finds these images by doing random web searches,
and then extracting images from the returned pages. It can also be
set up to filter the images through the "VidWhacker" program.
WARNING: THE INTERNET SOMETIMES CONTAINS PORNOGRAPHY.
The Internet being what it is, absolutely anything might show up in the
collage including -- quite possibly -- pornography, or even nudity.
Please act accordingly.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
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WhirlwindWarp
Floating stars are acted upon by a mixture of simple 2D
forcefields. The strength of each forcefield changes
continuously, and it is also switched on and off at random.
Written by Paul 'Joey' Clark; 2001. |
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WhirlyGig
Draws zooming chains of sinusoidal spots.
Written by Ashton Trey Belew; 2001. |
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Worm
Draws multicolored worms that crawl around the screen.
Written by Brad Taylor, Dave Lemke, Boris Putanec, and Henrik Theiling; 1991. |
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Wormhole
Flying through a colored wormhole in space.
Written by Jon Rafkind; 2004. |
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XAnalogTV
XAnalogTV shows a detailed simulation of an old TV set showing various
test patterns, with various picture artifacts like snow, bloom,
distortion, ghosting, and hash noise. It also simulates the TV warming
up. It will cycle through 12 channels, some with images you give it,
and some with color bars or nothing but static.
Written by Trevor Blackwell; 2003. |
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Xflame
Draws a simulation of pulsing fire. It can also take an arbitrary
image and set it on fire too.
Written by Carsten Haitzler and many others; 1999. |
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Xjack
This program behaves schizophrenically and makes a lot of typos.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1997. |
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Xlyap
This generates pretty fractal pictures via the Lyapunov exponent.
Written by Ron Record; 1997. |
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XMatrix
Draws dropping characters similar to what is seen on the computer
monitors in "The Matrix".
See also "glmatrix" for a 3D rendering of the similar effect that
appeared in the title sequence of the movie.
Written by Jamie Zawinski; 1999. |
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XRaySwarm
Draws a few swarms of critters flying around the screen, with
faded color trails behind them.
Written by Chris Leger; 2000. |
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XSpiroGraph
Simulates that pen-in-nested-plastic-gears toy from your childhood.
Written by Rohit Singh; 2000. |
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Zoom
Zooms in on a part of the screen and then moves around. With the
"Lenses" option, the result is like looking through many overlapping
lenses rather than just a simple zoom.
Written by James Macnicol; 2001. |
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