Lizard Saver!
Out of the blue, I received a tweet from Steven Blackford:
@bbum Wanted to say thanks the old BackSpace Module LizardView. Still using it after all these years on all my NeXT systems.
Wow. That took me back nearly 20 years! From the moment I started writing Objective-C code on a NeXT in 1989, I have taken a break every couple of years to write a screensaver or five. They have always been fairly simple, always geometric in nature, and generally with a bit of fractally goodness.
At left is a screenshot of LizardView. It was one of the first screensavers I wrote for the NeXT. Fortunately, Steven still had the source for LizardView (I likely still do, too, on one of the optical discs in my garage) and it took me about 10 minutes to port it to Mac OS X Leopard.
Blast from the past.
If you’d like to experience this awzzum zele-bra-shun of k0l0rfull moiré patterns, I dropped Lizard.saver.zip on friday.com.
Funny story; in about 1996 or 97, I found myself at a rather random (and not that terribly good) rave like party in St. Louis, MO. There was a video projector that was running some “rave animations” loop. Lizard was used throughout as 5 or so second interstitial between different animation sequences!
May 21st, 2009 at 1:08 am
Love the story Bill! Thanks for the port to also! BTW, I think the screensaver had the same affect on my oldest sun when he stayed up w/ me all those late nights as a baby.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:18 am
Anyone remember MartinView? I’d love to see how fast that could run on a modern machine.
-jcr
May 21st, 2009 at 6:21 am
Got a copy of SpaxeWars lying around?
May 21st, 2009 at 9:08 am
I remember that one also.
John, I found one version w/ source for NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and one for OS X Server w/ source. I put them up on the web site if you’re interested in them.
http://kb7sqi.com/files/misc/MartinView/
May 21st, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Fitz there’s still some mirror of peanuts/peak around the net.
Here you’ll find SpaxeWars:
http://nextstuff.info/mirrors/next-ftp.peak.org/next/apps/games/xox/
October 19th, 2009 at 2:25 am
[...] months ago, I ported an ancient screensaver of mine to Mac OS X (then Leopard) and made the binary [...]