ChristTrekker
Well-known member
So whatever happened to that notion of a petition drive to bring AD back to OS X? I'd love to see a screensaver module or conversion tool that would make all the classic AD modules usable again.
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Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.
After Dark Reborn
- Thread starter ChristTrekker
- Start date
Scott Baret
Well-known member
I think the only reason it never came around is because with LCDs and energy-efficient sleep modes there is very little call for screen savers.
Still, I'd love to see something done with After Dark for OS X. Even if it was Ben Haller releasing a carbonized version of Lunatic Fringe (maybe as a stand-alone program). Didn't he do that with Solarian II? You Bet Your Head from AD 3.0 would be another good one to revive.
I don't think the original AD guys had any plans to bring it back though. There was an excellent series of interviews with them on LEM last year and I don't think they said it was in the cards, but then again stranger things have happened and things come to those who wait. (I'm still waiting for the Fool's Errand sequel...hopefully I will be playing it by Christmas!)
Still, I'd love to see something done with After Dark for OS X. Even if it was Ben Haller releasing a carbonized version of Lunatic Fringe (maybe as a stand-alone program). Didn't he do that with Solarian II? You Bet Your Head from AD 3.0 would be another good one to revive.
I don't think the original AD guys had any plans to bring it back though. There was an excellent series of interviews with them on LEM last year and I don't think they said it was in the cards, but then again stranger things have happened and things come to those who wait. (I'm still waiting for the Fool's Errand sequel...hopefully I will be playing it by Christmas!)
ChristTrekker
Well-known member
Oh I completely understand that screensavers are unnecessary these days...but they're great fun and wonderful diversions.
The Berkeley Sys guys wouldn't even need to work on writing something themselves. I completely understand if they've moved on. (No pun intended.) Just release or write up a spec of the data files...I bet there's someone that would write an OS X screensaver module that could read/run them.
The Berkeley Sys guys wouldn't even need to work on writing something themselves. I completely understand if they've moved on. (No pun intended.) Just release or write up a spec of the data files...I bet there's someone that would write an OS X screensaver module that could read/run them.
ChristTrekker
Well-known member
I don't really care about flying toasters and fish. I want the Star Trek modules I purchased to work again.
Driverguru
Member
Hi,
I stumbled upon this group today.
I am the main author of "You Bet Your Head!" from AD 3.0 and my name is James M (the full name is in the module, but I do not like to see my name on the internet)
I can get ALL of these to run again, if you really need it and if i have time. Or I can help someone.
In fact, a two line code fix would have made all the after dark products work even on 9.2.2 I seem to recall (the main engine was defective).
Steve Zellers (number one experienced tech guru lead) made a boo boo I think, and oddly the company never got their engine to work as apple updated the OS.
The Number two coder god was James M also but last name was Mattly), I am not Mattly. I am the other James M.
I was number 3 guy at Berkeley Systems, skills wise. In fact as I wrote that particular module (You Bet Your Head) which eventually became You don’t Know Jack after it was so successful, I had just shipped a second version of FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit. (I also had way more sound effects, graphics and zaniness in You Bet Your Head, but they gutted it and whittled it down a year later when they shipped it to get it to fit on floppy discs! It still was a hit. Annoyingly they added another guys name along with mine in the credits, for no damned reason, but I wrote every line.
In fact, both After Dark 3 and FWB CD-ROM Toolkit were both in top 10 unit sales the same month and I wrote 100% of the FWB CD-ROM Toolkit product and all of the AD plugin game I mentioned already.
anyway... i shipped some OS X cocoa stuff this last month "Sprint SmartView" for mac a couple months ago. Yup, another multi million dollar generating app majority crafted by me, (GPS mapping and more for sprint cell data cards for Mac users).
I have also written a hundreds other things: firmware for Mac fibre channel cards, special effects for movies and tv, lots of Windows programs, etc.
BUT MY NAME IS NOT LOCATABLE ON THE INTERNET ANYWHERE, try Google for hours if you do not believe me. I am the most humble person you would know, other than the boasting in this post.
The people that share the same name as I, can be found using google but they are not me, and one oddly enough is a programmer (the windows CE guy).
PLEASE keep my last name out of this thread. I am not kidding that my name is nowhere on the entire internet except perhaps patent grants or trademarks or periodic 'Edgar' US filings.
If my name appears here on this web site I will not contribute overtly nor covertly to any of your endeavors. You will also really make me sad.
I am the most famous anonymous person in history. heh.
And I am here, and genuine, and willing to help you guys.
Heck I almost ported some AD modules (rewritten parts by me to PowerPC first, then reconsidered as C) just because many people do not know the origins of Itunes Visualizer which came from Sound Jam, which descended from a Berkeley Systems module called Frost and Fire which came from a long time special effects coding guru not mentioned in this thread.
I cant believe you guys mentioned one of the things I crafted over 14 years ago in a thread this week. I have to say one thing... even though it was only 10 weeks of design and coding, it is one of my fondest memories to this day. I coded software for a decade before that as well, by the way. I owned an Apple II when they came out.
I am a geezer, but i still do 86 hour work weeks every week to this day and live on no sleep. (slept 3 hours last night, 4 hours the night before), typically need 5.25 hours though.
Somehow I will make time to help out the cause here.
=James M
I stumbled upon this group today.
I am the main author of "You Bet Your Head!" from AD 3.0 and my name is James M (the full name is in the module, but I do not like to see my name on the internet)
I can get ALL of these to run again, if you really need it and if i have time. Or I can help someone.
In fact, a two line code fix would have made all the after dark products work even on 9.2.2 I seem to recall (the main engine was defective).
Steve Zellers (number one experienced tech guru lead) made a boo boo I think, and oddly the company never got their engine to work as apple updated the OS.
The Number two coder god was James M also but last name was Mattly), I am not Mattly. I am the other James M.
I was number 3 guy at Berkeley Systems, skills wise. In fact as I wrote that particular module (You Bet Your Head) which eventually became You don’t Know Jack after it was so successful, I had just shipped a second version of FWB's CD-ROM Toolkit. (I also had way more sound effects, graphics and zaniness in You Bet Your Head, but they gutted it and whittled it down a year later when they shipped it to get it to fit on floppy discs! It still was a hit. Annoyingly they added another guys name along with mine in the credits, for no damned reason, but I wrote every line.
In fact, both After Dark 3 and FWB CD-ROM Toolkit were both in top 10 unit sales the same month and I wrote 100% of the FWB CD-ROM Toolkit product and all of the AD plugin game I mentioned already.
anyway... i shipped some OS X cocoa stuff this last month "Sprint SmartView" for mac a couple months ago. Yup, another multi million dollar generating app majority crafted by me, (GPS mapping and more for sprint cell data cards for Mac users).
I have also written a hundreds other things: firmware for Mac fibre channel cards, special effects for movies and tv, lots of Windows programs, etc.
BUT MY NAME IS NOT LOCATABLE ON THE INTERNET ANYWHERE, try Google for hours if you do not believe me. I am the most humble person you would know, other than the boasting in this post.
The people that share the same name as I, can be found using google but they are not me, and one oddly enough is a programmer (the windows CE guy).
PLEASE keep my last name out of this thread. I am not kidding that my name is nowhere on the entire internet except perhaps patent grants or trademarks or periodic 'Edgar' US filings.
If my name appears here on this web site I will not contribute overtly nor covertly to any of your endeavors. You will also really make me sad.
I am the most famous anonymous person in history. heh.
And I am here, and genuine, and willing to help you guys.
Heck I almost ported some AD modules (rewritten parts by me to PowerPC first, then reconsidered as C) just because many people do not know the origins of Itunes Visualizer which came from Sound Jam, which descended from a Berkeley Systems module called Frost and Fire which came from a long time special effects coding guru not mentioned in this thread.
I cant believe you guys mentioned one of the things I crafted over 14 years ago in a thread this week. I have to say one thing... even though it was only 10 weeks of design and coding, it is one of my fondest memories to this day. I coded software for a decade before that as well, by the way. I owned an Apple II when they came out.
I am a geezer, but i still do 86 hour work weeks every week to this day and live on no sleep. (slept 3 hours last night, 4 hours the night before), typically need 5.25 hours though.
Somehow I will make time to help out the cause here.
=James M
LCGuy
LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Wow...its great to hear from you, Driverguru! Welcome to the forums by the way. I knew that the iTunes Visualiser came from SoundJam, as did most of (actually, all of, from memory) iTunes 1, but I had no idea that the SoundJam visualiser actually started out as an After Dark module...thats really interesitng. I'll have to check my (legit!) copy of AD 2 and see if its included in that. Still, its great to hear from someone who, IMHO at least, helped write one of the greatest screen saver apps ever, especially for offering to help us.
For the record, I still have my orange Flying Toasters pen! :beige: Even though it don't work anymore
I knew that the iTunes Visualiser came from SoundJam, as did most of (actually, all of, from memory) iTunes 1, but I had no idea that the SoundJam visualiser actually started out as an After Dark module...thats really interesitng. I'll have to check my (legit!) copy of AD 2 and see if its included in that. Still, its great to hear from someone who, IMHO at least, helped write one of the greatest screen saver apps ever, especially for offering to help us. For the record, I still have my orange Flying Toasters pen! :beige: Even though it don't work anymore
SiliconValleyPirate
Well-known member
I have a Berkeley Systems Flying Toasters t-shirt somewhere my mum and dad imported for me from the USA, back in the days before we had the internet and online ordering, you had to fill out a coupon from the software pack with your credit card details and delivery address and post it to them.
Driverguru
Member
Although there are published specs for writing 3rd party After Dark modules (Those also work with Tom Dowdy's "DarkSide of the Macintosh"), some of the more treasured ones are commercial offerings that violate the rules, published by Berkeley Systems themselves.
Berkeley Systems, in “Star Trek”, “Disney”, and “AfterDark v3.0” and later, used custom shared libraries and custom loaders and such, and were multimodule incompatible as a result. Some of the sharing of libraries was to allow source code to compile on Windows or Mac, some was to aid in loading stacks of art taken from Macromedia (Adobe now) Director (Shockwave eventually) that were then tweaked in Equilibrium's 400 dollar DeBabelizer : http://www.manifest-tech.com/ce_photo/debab_batch.htm
So to run ALL the modules under OS X no matter what, an engineer tasked with the big puzzle needs to probably just select a full OS to emulate, then to make it work to feed into an output area when requested, and to have the system "booted" and idle until summoned by this OSX consumer task.
Color Quickdraw has "bottleneck" interception points, and the wide range of issues in performing a partial port end up being as much work as porting a full emulator of a machine.
Emulating PowerPC to emulate 68020 is foolish (Apple only ever wrote a 68020 emulator with one extra opcode MOVE16). Therefore the best solution is to emulate a 68040 or 68020 and run a system old enough to run EVERY normal commercial After Dark module. This omits the few that require PowerPC (terrains?), but allows the largest total number of modules.
For speed on slow PowerPCs, the emulator should probably be a tweaked emulator that can dynamically "recompile" 8K (or 4k) pages marked as "modded" or "still-unmodded" similar to most modern 68020 emulators. It allows self modifying code, though rarely encounterred. Some might call this speed up “JIT” (dynamic translation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation , as created and proposed by the famous Tom Pittman for mac users. In fact Apple's cruddy 68020 emulator by Gary Davidian used in Mac OS was sped up triple-speed by ideas from Tom Pittman's award winning paper at 1994 Mack Hack computer conference : http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.10/10.09/Machack94/index.html
Truthfully, a modern CPU would not need a super-optimized 68020 emulator with Dynamic Translation but it would need to avoid the abomination of attempting to emulate a PowerPC emulating a 68020.
A Mac OS x program would be fed data when a ‘Gestalt selector’ being monitored in the emulated environment indicated that a screen saver was active and finally rendering to screen buffer (the SAVC gestalt). Screen doubling and quadrupling would be needed to fill out modern large screens. Some blurring and upsampling would be welcome.
Color Table cycling from the emulated world would "just work" and 60 FPS should be possible.
Saving CPU cycles could be achieved by having emulator mark "dirty" horizontal pixel buffer lines needing update since last transfer out to destination graphics buffers. It could do so by forcing access errors on the pages, but this overhead might be far too much to bear, and instead full screen xfer waste might be unavoidable.
Modern GPU can be used for the scaling, or the same code used in VLC for stretching could be used.
Decoupling the output from the emulator allowing dropped animation frames, while preserving proper timing animation+music heartbeat is preferred, to avoid the insidious "Flash Animation" atrocity of stuttered-velocity of objects being affected by dropped frames. Therefore consumer-producer screen buffer tasks should be decoupled in this project.
I propose using OS 7.5.5 through 7.6.1 (or 8.1) in the emulated environment, mainly because later versions are biased against 68K in some ways for performance. Additionally, T/MON debugger works fine in versions of mac before 8.0, and without Viacom Cable's T/MON (T-MON, TMON), hacker work gets done a lot slower. Way slower than when forced to use Motorola’s MacsBug.
An emulator comes to mind that is easy enough to use, and capable of OS 7.5.5 through 7.6.1, and uses 68020 : Basilisk 2, and Gwenolé Beauchesne's sometimes problematic "JIT Basilisk II". It will allow 128 megabytes of system RAM to play with, does 68040 (possibly patches roms for 68060 too, and Amiga, UNIX, BeOS, Windows 9x, Windows NT (win2000, XP etc) Linux/i386, Linux/x86_64, FreeBSD/i386 and MacOS X for Intel.
So basically we are looking at highly customizing and resubmitting patches back, to a copy of the May 2006 Basilisk 2 fork : http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/basilisk2
Because it is a 68K being emulated the speed of the screensavers will be very fast on Intel hosts. PowerPC hosts is another problem, because JIT Basilisk 2 fork was not targeted for it, from what I recall, but original Basilisk 2 source for BeOS used PowerPC, so maybe something is possible.
For now we will concentrate on Intel, because a very fast Hackintosh can be built to run OSX on 500 dollars of hardware. I will not forget PowerPc though.
For simplicity we will run the emulator on one task (one cpu) and the assistant feeder to the OpenGL/CoreGraphics scaler output on another.
For amusement sake, we might want to run two emulators (or more) on other tasks (cpus) and multiplex their outputs together in a blend to create our own brute force MULTIMODULE for naughty arrogant screensaver modules that are not Multimodule-capable.
As a crowning achievement, we might run other peoples modern OS X modules as well, adn blend them over or under the old Mac OS 7 modules.
So much to think about.
The remaining annoying aspects are mouse interaction, and picking a proper after dark engine product capable of running everything ever written, but still able to be hacked on a bit, but thats OK.
Because screensaver modules have access to the Macintosh OS, and all of Quickdraw, the only solution to run all screensaver modules is in the form of color capable Mac OS emulation.
But full emulation containment allows one thing I always wanted since before 1990 : running AfterDark compatible screensavers as a desktop layer, and running AfterDark compatible screensavers very very early boot during the entire Grey-Screen boot screen.
Because of that showstopping feature (OSX boot time screensaver effects), I predict NEW people will start writing "Darkside of the Mac" and "After Dark" modules in 2008 / 2009 following the old MacOS 7 After Dark SDK. I know I would. We can’t call it “Before Dark” because that product name was taken already by a popular desktop pattern tool. We could call the feature “Before Darkside” though.
Please excuse the phrase 'ScreenSaver; thoughout my post. I call them “ScreenWasters” and have all my life, even when I wrote them for a living. Though while at work on company equipment I had to run them and not fade the screen to black as part of testing other peoples work for QA testing. Nowadays I do run “screen savers”, but also kill the screen to black after about an hour of the screenwaster running. (I am not "cool"). But I understand others are, and seek more coolness. Boot-time After Dark modules I deem to be ultra cool.
The Mac needs some more coolness added, people just need to envision it.
Berkeley Systems, in “Star Trek”, “Disney”, and “AfterDark v3.0” and later, used custom shared libraries and custom loaders and such, and were multimodule incompatible as a result. Some of the sharing of libraries was to allow source code to compile on Windows or Mac, some was to aid in loading stacks of art taken from Macromedia (Adobe now) Director (Shockwave eventually) that were then tweaked in Equilibrium's 400 dollar DeBabelizer : http://www.manifest-tech.com/ce_photo/debab_batch.htm
So to run ALL the modules under OS X no matter what, an engineer tasked with the big puzzle needs to probably just select a full OS to emulate, then to make it work to feed into an output area when requested, and to have the system "booted" and idle until summoned by this OSX consumer task.
Color Quickdraw has "bottleneck" interception points, and the wide range of issues in performing a partial port end up being as much work as porting a full emulator of a machine.
Emulating PowerPC to emulate 68020 is foolish (Apple only ever wrote a 68020 emulator with one extra opcode MOVE16). Therefore the best solution is to emulate a 68040 or 68020 and run a system old enough to run EVERY normal commercial After Dark module. This omits the few that require PowerPC (terrains?), but allows the largest total number of modules.
For speed on slow PowerPCs, the emulator should probably be a tweaked emulator that can dynamically "recompile" 8K (or 4k) pages marked as "modded" or "still-unmodded" similar to most modern 68020 emulators. It allows self modifying code, though rarely encounterred. Some might call this speed up “JIT” (dynamic translation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation , as created and proposed by the famous Tom Pittman for mac users. In fact Apple's cruddy 68020 emulator by Gary Davidian used in Mac OS was sped up triple-speed by ideas from Tom Pittman's award winning paper at 1994 Mack Hack computer conference : http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.10/10.09/Machack94/index.html
Truthfully, a modern CPU would not need a super-optimized 68020 emulator with Dynamic Translation but it would need to avoid the abomination of attempting to emulate a PowerPC emulating a 68020.
A Mac OS x program would be fed data when a ‘Gestalt selector’ being monitored in the emulated environment indicated that a screen saver was active and finally rendering to screen buffer (the SAVC gestalt). Screen doubling and quadrupling would be needed to fill out modern large screens. Some blurring and upsampling would be welcome.
Color Table cycling from the emulated world would "just work" and 60 FPS should be possible.
Saving CPU cycles could be achieved by having emulator mark "dirty" horizontal pixel buffer lines needing update since last transfer out to destination graphics buffers. It could do so by forcing access errors on the pages, but this overhead might be far too much to bear, and instead full screen xfer waste might be unavoidable.
Modern GPU can be used for the scaling, or the same code used in VLC for stretching could be used.
Decoupling the output from the emulator allowing dropped animation frames, while preserving proper timing animation+music heartbeat is preferred, to avoid the insidious "Flash Animation" atrocity of stuttered-velocity of objects being affected by dropped frames. Therefore consumer-producer screen buffer tasks should be decoupled in this project.
I propose using OS 7.5.5 through 7.6.1 (or 8.1) in the emulated environment, mainly because later versions are biased against 68K in some ways for performance. Additionally, T/MON debugger works fine in versions of mac before 8.0, and without Viacom Cable's T/MON (T-MON, TMON), hacker work gets done a lot slower. Way slower than when forced to use Motorola’s MacsBug.
An emulator comes to mind that is easy enough to use, and capable of OS 7.5.5 through 7.6.1, and uses 68020 : Basilisk 2, and Gwenolé Beauchesne's sometimes problematic "JIT Basilisk II". It will allow 128 megabytes of system RAM to play with, does 68040 (possibly patches roms for 68060 too, and Amiga, UNIX, BeOS, Windows 9x, Windows NT (win2000, XP etc) Linux/i386, Linux/x86_64, FreeBSD/i386 and MacOS X for Intel.
So basically we are looking at highly customizing and resubmitting patches back, to a copy of the May 2006 Basilisk 2 fork : http://gwenole.beauchesne.info//en/projects/basilisk2
Because it is a 68K being emulated the speed of the screensavers will be very fast on Intel hosts. PowerPC hosts is another problem, because JIT Basilisk 2 fork was not targeted for it, from what I recall, but original Basilisk 2 source for BeOS used PowerPC, so maybe something is possible.
For now we will concentrate on Intel, because a very fast Hackintosh can be built to run OSX on 500 dollars of hardware. I will not forget PowerPc though.
For simplicity we will run the emulator on one task (one cpu) and the assistant feeder to the OpenGL/CoreGraphics scaler output on another.
For amusement sake, we might want to run two emulators (or more) on other tasks (cpus) and multiplex their outputs together in a blend to create our own brute force MULTIMODULE for naughty arrogant screensaver modules that are not Multimodule-capable.
As a crowning achievement, we might run other peoples modern OS X modules as well, adn blend them over or under the old Mac OS 7 modules.
So much to think about.
The remaining annoying aspects are mouse interaction, and picking a proper after dark engine product capable of running everything ever written, but still able to be hacked on a bit, but thats OK.
Because screensaver modules have access to the Macintosh OS, and all of Quickdraw, the only solution to run all screensaver modules is in the form of color capable Mac OS emulation.
But full emulation containment allows one thing I always wanted since before 1990 : running AfterDark compatible screensavers as a desktop layer, and running AfterDark compatible screensavers very very early boot during the entire Grey-Screen boot screen.
Because of that showstopping feature (OSX boot time screensaver effects), I predict NEW people will start writing "Darkside of the Mac" and "After Dark" modules in 2008 / 2009 following the old MacOS 7 After Dark SDK. I know I would. We can’t call it “Before Dark” because that product name was taken already by a popular desktop pattern tool. We could call the feature “Before Darkside” though.
Please excuse the phrase 'ScreenSaver; thoughout my post. I call them “ScreenWasters” and have all my life, even when I wrote them for a living. Though while at work on company equipment I had to run them and not fade the screen to black as part of testing other peoples work for QA testing. Nowadays I do run “screen savers”, but also kill the screen to black after about an hour of the screenwaster running. (I am not "cool"). But I understand others are, and seek more coolness. Boot-time After Dark modules I deem to be ultra cool.
The Mac needs some more coolness added, people just need to envision it.
Scott Baret
Well-known member
I want to personally thank you for your dedication to After Dark, especially the "You Bet Your Head" module. When I got After Dark 3.0 on CD in 1996 for Easter (yes, I got flying toasters instead of chocolate rabbits in my basket when I was 9), I spent countless hours playing around with it--and the game feature of that module--on my Mac LC.
I got the Disney Collection for my Windows computer of the day and to this day it's one of my favorite collections of all time. (I only wish I had also bought it for my Mac--I've been looking for it since then).
I was actually thinking of "Darkside" when this topic came up. I remembered reading about it and for a while had the name stuck in my head (probably because I like Pink Floyd) but it was on the tip of my tongue the other day and I couldn't get the name out. It would work, but from what I recall "Darkside" was an application and not a startup document like After Dark was. (I think I've got this right?)
I'd love to see the old modules back in action. I retired my LC from use in 2003 (to put it in its original box) and now have no Macs set up that can run the After Dark CD (unless I get my Colour Classic restored). I'd love to be able to, at the very least, see them in action on my OS 9 iBook G3 (especially the one called Vista, since it was PPC-only and I never got to see it since I had an LC...yes, an original 68020 LC). Using them on OS X with an Intel processor would be even better.
BTW: I still have one of those old order forms for a flying toasters shirt, which I always wanted--do you think anyone would still have them? (A longshot, I know, but worth a shot).
I got the Disney Collection for my Windows computer of the day and to this day it's one of my favorite collections of all time. (I only wish I had also bought it for my Mac--I've been looking for it since then).
I was actually thinking of "Darkside" when this topic came up. I remembered reading about it and for a while had the name stuck in my head (probably because I like Pink Floyd) but it was on the tip of my tongue the other day and I couldn't get the name out. It would work, but from what I recall "Darkside" was an application and not a startup document like After Dark was. (I think I've got this right?)
I'd love to see the old modules back in action. I retired my LC from use in 2003 (to put it in its original box) and now have no Macs set up that can run the After Dark CD (unless I get my Colour Classic restored). I'd love to be able to, at the very least, see them in action on my OS 9 iBook G3 (especially the one called Vista, since it was PPC-only and I never got to see it since I had an LC...yes, an original 68020 LC). Using them on OS X with an Intel processor would be even better.
BTW: I still have one of those old order forms for a flying toasters shirt, which I always wanted--do you think anyone would still have them? (A longshot, I know, but worth a shot).
Driverguru
Member
Scott,
The longest stream of consciousness diatribe ever to be seen here… announcing :
Copious ramblings by me brought about by your T-Shirt comments herein :
Incidentally, most foreign territories for software purchases have to go through thuggish regional distributors that buy and "own" the territory rights. Making product fulfillment for things like T-Shirts to Australia problematic. Sometimes territories are individual countries in my experience : france, denmark, Iceland, etc. Small “localizers” OWN the rights for sales, many refused to drop prices.
About the toaster :
Because money was pouring in bushels every week, at the Berkeley Systems office they treated "The Toaster" with utmost reverence. The main conference room had around it a large collection of expensive gleaming toasters.
It was not the only shrine room though, in the 200+ person company (might have been 180 but close enough). The other shrine was a darkened cubicle reserved for "Da Mouse"
Da Mouse was Mickey Mouse, whom out of reverence you never dare invoke the name aloud other than saying 'Da Mouse". There was incense and a black velvet picture of Da Mouse i remember. It was like a hindu shrine. I think they lit a candle on final builds before shipping. They should have been making duplicates of the damned source code. Like 3 other companies I know, fools there sometimes forget to preserve a copy of the final source and tools used to make a commercial release requiring binary hacking to make mods in the future.
One time Berkeley Systems got in trouble over Da Mouse. A prototype version had Da Mouse hold a hoop and jump through it himself while holding it. Disney quality and standards had us remove it stating " Mickey shall never perform circus acts "
They also gave us all the merchandising allowed expressions in the expression books. Pete the Dragon cannot EVER have a mean face or EVER get angry for example.
One nonlegal thing was put in one screen saver as an "easter egg" and had to be removed. In The Simpsons screen saver Itchy and Scratchy had the cat get the mouse on a particular day of the year (april 1?) and that is very very forbidden. The mouse ALWAYS has to win in the Simpsons universe.
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) from Star Trek had to approve himself in all merchandising as per his own contract. So spock had to review himself in the screen saver, marching profile with jackboots on like a goosestepping nazi. But that was OK with him. He cared more about his face I guess even though so few pixels were available.
Like you, I liked the Disney one too. The music was charming, and it really was refreshing. Annoyingly, the sound music driver that played the music could have been better in my opinion. It was Halestorm's SoundMusicSys a MIDI driven software sample-playback synthesizer developed by Steve Hales and Jim Nitchals. Halestorm sucked in my opinion because I had written a better one that I never hipped. His did not ue different samples for 32nd notes and 64th notes so a flute, for example, would be all attack. The bug was that his engine used MIDI on and off events, like QuickTime does, and had no concept of note duration even though the data was recorded ahead of time. The compositions were amazing. Disney wrote it but Halestorm had to bring it to life with about 8 instruments or so at a time. I think Peter Drescher might have worked on some compositions.
Halestorm was superior to Apples (much later) General Midi player because Apples stopped playing if applications got no CPU time, but Halestorm was interrupt driven and played music even while in T/MON debugger I think I recall (if T/Mon default was set to allow drivers to run while debugging, such as network, etc).
The only After Dark tshirt I think I might have had was a After Dark 'Bad Dog' with a dog pissing yellow piss on some object (a trash can?). Back in the 80s and 90s developer teams at huge companies made tshirts to feel good. Apple had countless ones, especially groups at apple that never shipped a single useful product that lived more than 2 years, such as Apples entire "Advanced Technology Group"
Apple only allowed about eight 3rd party products to ship on CDs provided with a particular mac (8500?) and one of the three was After Dark 3. And my game was indeed the star highlight (You Bet your Head, the early precursor to You don’t Know Jack).
After Dark 3 was the most popular of their revenue I think, and I was glad to have worked on that version. Though it was a fiasco due to mismanagement of engineering. They wanted to ship in about 5 months (dec 15th) and I said they could never make that deadline and my calculations showed 6 months maybe 7 with super gods rock star coder gurus.
They were enraged at me. I insisted that they would never ship by December.
I held my ground in the engineering argument. They said “failure was not an option”. I told them they did not know engineering well. And I knew what resources they had to use, so I gave them my 2 weeks written notice to quit.
Berkeley Systems never shipped After Dark v3 in 5 months. or 18 months.
They never shipped that December nor even shipped the FOLLOWING DECEMBER !!
I was of course, correct. They shipped after two decembers came and went. And the delivery medium (a pair of floppy disks) was comical, in a world of CD-ROMS. They chopped content out of the content-rich screensavers to get it to fit on floppies.
The reason they never got it to ship was because they lost all their best engineers, most of whom quit because of visible brain drain. (Basically they had super star high paid coders, and had low paid novice students from the university, and no engineers in between). The problem was "everyones voice counted" and in meetings everything was a democracy.
Actually it was an Idiocracy.
One vote they took was , I KID YOU NOT, to rename every filename from 31 characters or so to 8 character filenames as corporate policy even though windows and the compiler and debuggers had no problem with filenames larger than 8 characters on floppy nor hard drive.
The 8 character vote won. Even though 8 character filenames all piled up on the rootlevel of a C: driver on a shared PC is as close to an Abomination from Hell as one could fathom. A true travesty of all that is acceptable or sane. I proclaimed aloud at the meeting that I had not used 8 character filenames on a Macintosh in my life and on windows rarely ever created them. I told everyone there that I would NEVER start creating 8 character filenames for source code. Some chuckled and muttered "oh yes you will" and I smirked back "Oh no I won't, you will see".
... and of course, after working day and night for my 2 weeks notice (and finishing my project), I got the hell out of that Idiocracy before ever having to create a 8 character filename.
After I quit EVERY good engineer quit one by one. One stayed behind a while collecting the name badges in a small grim collection. My name badge was first in the collection. 8 other big league coders name badges followed mine. Many gave a reason of quitting as "I am quitting because quit.", and that became a running gag of sorts. Every engineer that quit one by one said as one reason that they quit "because quit" after first listing the other engineers names.
Amusingly, a HR person and two others gave exit interviews to get you to say WHY you were quitting and I refused to say one word. I kept repeating "no reason" and it infuriated them all and saddened my mentor and boss (a truly great man). (My boss also did not know why I was quitting. He also did not know that I was the aggitant source of a hilarious flame-war blog he read everyday on the internet (the famed Linda Kaplan flamewar), something I started before meeting him) But Berkeley Ssyetms knew my quitting was not pay.
Pay there was good. Pay at all silicon valley booming companies is great for star engineers.
Berkeley Systems gave a 20 or 25,000 dollar bonus to a mid level (low level) product manager. I saw it personally. (he orchestrated shipping the MS-DOS (not windows) version of After Dark on time. Typical yearly silicon valley bonuses were 5 to 10 thousand dollars.
I never told them why I quit and the ripple effect of the rest quitting quickly sunk Berkeley Systems.
The project I worked on immediately after quitting was successful in its own right and a few months later my next product was featured in a long article as front page news in a major newspaper, as the main topic. (it was digital puppetry animation software that moved the mouths of the characters as the actors spoke, and had fancy backgrounds)
Every company I quit goes out of business less than 2 years (sometimes 1.5) after I quit. I think the list of dead companies is endless. I am not indispensable, but when I quit, others quit too. I joke about that fact at companies and they say "then you had better not quit". And of course... eventually I quit and they go out of business for a variety of reasons. Even the founding engineers soon quit !
Mercifully, I tend to work as a contractor, not an employee. Most contractors cost too much to own as employees permanently.
Speaking of quitting, the last and final product left in the dead company of Berkeley Systems was You Don’t Know Jack. (not kidding). How amusing and ironic.
Oh…. I never told anyone in the world why I quit. EVER. The reason is quite amusing. I am telling you all now here for the first time over 14 years later. The reason the company imploded (all because I quit) is :
I quit because my printed and signed employment offer letter with Berkeley Systems was not being honored, nor would they. In it, I negotiated a fully paid company parking spot. They said they would pay me DOUBLE to pay it myself each month (a building next door). I refused. I am a man of my word. They are not.
I quit one company over the time I was allowed to start work even though I was not “officially” being asked to come in earlier, even though I worked more hours per day every day than anyone in the firm. (It was because I never left for lunch hour like other engineers and to buy tacos at taco bell I had to start work at 10:36 am every day). That company refused to believe that was the sole reason I was quitting and quitting cost them a lot of money. (sometimes 2 thousand a day in fees to me) as I “went contractor” on them. But that was not the plan. I did not quit to milk them.
Yes… I am a Prima Donna. But that company with the taco story made 4 million dollars a year in at least one year from one of my products (that I wrote every single line of).
Some other products of mine have sold 750,000 paid licensed physical copies. Some products sell one copy (very vertical). Some products sell no copies because I write them for free and they are meant to be used for free.
The thing I wrote two months ago will sell 200,000 paid for copies (it phones home so it can be accurately tracked, and that is the lowball estimate).
I mention these numbers because commercial mass market software is a huge industry. But it is still an artform. A craft. It is not something you can learn in a college. Its almost something you have to be born with. Like chess playing. Craftsmanship may be related to IQ, but when IBM hired the smartest people they could find in the 1950s they sucked at programming after training. Its an art. And with artists you do have Prima Donnas, and you better treat them properly and with due respect.
That is why you have no After Dark screensavers for sale nor working on OS X.
The longest stream of consciousness diatribe ever to be seen here… announcing :
Copious ramblings by me brought about by your T-Shirt comments herein :
Incidentally, most foreign territories for software purchases have to go through thuggish regional distributors that buy and "own" the territory rights. Making product fulfillment for things like T-Shirts to Australia problematic. Sometimes territories are individual countries in my experience : france, denmark, Iceland, etc. Small “localizers” OWN the rights for sales, many refused to drop prices.
About the toaster :
Because money was pouring in bushels every week, at the Berkeley Systems office they treated "The Toaster" with utmost reverence. The main conference room had around it a large collection of expensive gleaming toasters.
It was not the only shrine room though, in the 200+ person company (might have been 180 but close enough). The other shrine was a darkened cubicle reserved for "Da Mouse"
Da Mouse was Mickey Mouse, whom out of reverence you never dare invoke the name aloud other than saying 'Da Mouse". There was incense and a black velvet picture of Da Mouse i remember. It was like a hindu shrine. I think they lit a candle on final builds before shipping. They should have been making duplicates of the damned source code. Like 3 other companies I know, fools there sometimes forget to preserve a copy of the final source and tools used to make a commercial release requiring binary hacking to make mods in the future.
One time Berkeley Systems got in trouble over Da Mouse. A prototype version had Da Mouse hold a hoop and jump through it himself while holding it. Disney quality and standards had us remove it stating " Mickey shall never perform circus acts "
They also gave us all the merchandising allowed expressions in the expression books. Pete the Dragon cannot EVER have a mean face or EVER get angry for example.
One nonlegal thing was put in one screen saver as an "easter egg" and had to be removed. In The Simpsons screen saver Itchy and Scratchy had the cat get the mouse on a particular day of the year (april 1?) and that is very very forbidden. The mouse ALWAYS has to win in the Simpsons universe.
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) from Star Trek had to approve himself in all merchandising as per his own contract. So spock had to review himself in the screen saver, marching profile with jackboots on like a goosestepping nazi. But that was OK with him. He cared more about his face I guess even though so few pixels were available.
Like you, I liked the Disney one too. The music was charming, and it really was refreshing. Annoyingly, the sound music driver that played the music could have been better in my opinion. It was Halestorm's SoundMusicSys a MIDI driven software sample-playback synthesizer developed by Steve Hales and Jim Nitchals. Halestorm sucked in my opinion because I had written a better one that I never hipped. His did not ue different samples for 32nd notes and 64th notes so a flute, for example, would be all attack. The bug was that his engine used MIDI on and off events, like QuickTime does, and had no concept of note duration even though the data was recorded ahead of time. The compositions were amazing. Disney wrote it but Halestorm had to bring it to life with about 8 instruments or so at a time. I think Peter Drescher might have worked on some compositions.
Halestorm was superior to Apples (much later) General Midi player because Apples stopped playing if applications got no CPU time, but Halestorm was interrupt driven and played music even while in T/MON debugger I think I recall (if T/Mon default was set to allow drivers to run while debugging, such as network, etc).
The only After Dark tshirt I think I might have had was a After Dark 'Bad Dog' with a dog pissing yellow piss on some object (a trash can?). Back in the 80s and 90s developer teams at huge companies made tshirts to feel good. Apple had countless ones, especially groups at apple that never shipped a single useful product that lived more than 2 years, such as Apples entire "Advanced Technology Group"
Apple only allowed about eight 3rd party products to ship on CDs provided with a particular mac (8500?) and one of the three was After Dark 3. And my game was indeed the star highlight (You Bet your Head, the early precursor to You don’t Know Jack).
After Dark 3 was the most popular of their revenue I think, and I was glad to have worked on that version. Though it was a fiasco due to mismanagement of engineering. They wanted to ship in about 5 months (dec 15th) and I said they could never make that deadline and my calculations showed 6 months maybe 7 with super gods rock star coder gurus.
They were enraged at me. I insisted that they would never ship by December.
I held my ground in the engineering argument. They said “failure was not an option”. I told them they did not know engineering well. And I knew what resources they had to use, so I gave them my 2 weeks written notice to quit.
Berkeley Systems never shipped After Dark v3 in 5 months. or 18 months.
They never shipped that December nor even shipped the FOLLOWING DECEMBER !!
I was of course, correct. They shipped after two decembers came and went. And the delivery medium (a pair of floppy disks) was comical, in a world of CD-ROMS. They chopped content out of the content-rich screensavers to get it to fit on floppies.
The reason they never got it to ship was because they lost all their best engineers, most of whom quit because of visible brain drain. (Basically they had super star high paid coders, and had low paid novice students from the university, and no engineers in between). The problem was "everyones voice counted" and in meetings everything was a democracy.
Actually it was an Idiocracy.
One vote they took was , I KID YOU NOT, to rename every filename from 31 characters or so to 8 character filenames as corporate policy even though windows and the compiler and debuggers had no problem with filenames larger than 8 characters on floppy nor hard drive.
The 8 character vote won. Even though 8 character filenames all piled up on the rootlevel of a C: driver on a shared PC is as close to an Abomination from Hell as one could fathom. A true travesty of all that is acceptable or sane. I proclaimed aloud at the meeting that I had not used 8 character filenames on a Macintosh in my life and on windows rarely ever created them. I told everyone there that I would NEVER start creating 8 character filenames for source code. Some chuckled and muttered "oh yes you will" and I smirked back "Oh no I won't, you will see".
... and of course, after working day and night for my 2 weeks notice (and finishing my project), I got the hell out of that Idiocracy before ever having to create a 8 character filename.
After I quit EVERY good engineer quit one by one. One stayed behind a while collecting the name badges in a small grim collection. My name badge was first in the collection. 8 other big league coders name badges followed mine. Many gave a reason of quitting as "I am quitting because quit.", and that became a running gag of sorts. Every engineer that quit one by one said as one reason that they quit "because quit" after first listing the other engineers names.
Amusingly, a HR person and two others gave exit interviews to get you to say WHY you were quitting and I refused to say one word. I kept repeating "no reason" and it infuriated them all and saddened my mentor and boss (a truly great man). (My boss also did not know why I was quitting. He also did not know that I was the aggitant source of a hilarious flame-war blog he read everyday on the internet (the famed Linda Kaplan flamewar), something I started before meeting him) But Berkeley Ssyetms knew my quitting was not pay.
Pay there was good. Pay at all silicon valley booming companies is great for star engineers.
Berkeley Systems gave a 20 or 25,000 dollar bonus to a mid level (low level) product manager. I saw it personally. (he orchestrated shipping the MS-DOS (not windows) version of After Dark on time. Typical yearly silicon valley bonuses were 5 to 10 thousand dollars.
I never told them why I quit and the ripple effect of the rest quitting quickly sunk Berkeley Systems.
The project I worked on immediately after quitting was successful in its own right and a few months later my next product was featured in a long article as front page news in a major newspaper, as the main topic. (it was digital puppetry animation software that moved the mouths of the characters as the actors spoke, and had fancy backgrounds)
Every company I quit goes out of business less than 2 years (sometimes 1.5) after I quit. I think the list of dead companies is endless. I am not indispensable, but when I quit, others quit too. I joke about that fact at companies and they say "then you had better not quit". And of course... eventually I quit and they go out of business for a variety of reasons. Even the founding engineers soon quit !
Mercifully, I tend to work as a contractor, not an employee. Most contractors cost too much to own as employees permanently.
Speaking of quitting, the last and final product left in the dead company of Berkeley Systems was You Don’t Know Jack. (not kidding). How amusing and ironic.
Oh…. I never told anyone in the world why I quit. EVER. The reason is quite amusing. I am telling you all now here for the first time over 14 years later. The reason the company imploded (all because I quit) is :
I quit because my printed and signed employment offer letter with Berkeley Systems was not being honored, nor would they. In it, I negotiated a fully paid company parking spot. They said they would pay me DOUBLE to pay it myself each month (a building next door). I refused. I am a man of my word. They are not.
I quit one company over the time I was allowed to start work even though I was not “officially” being asked to come in earlier, even though I worked more hours per day every day than anyone in the firm. (It was because I never left for lunch hour like other engineers and to buy tacos at taco bell I had to start work at 10:36 am every day). That company refused to believe that was the sole reason I was quitting and quitting cost them a lot of money. (sometimes 2 thousand a day in fees to me) as I “went contractor” on them. But that was not the plan. I did not quit to milk them.
Yes… I am a Prima Donna. But that company with the taco story made 4 million dollars a year in at least one year from one of my products (that I wrote every single line of).
Some other products of mine have sold 750,000 paid licensed physical copies. Some products sell one copy (very vertical). Some products sell no copies because I write them for free and they are meant to be used for free.
The thing I wrote two months ago will sell 200,000 paid for copies (it phones home so it can be accurately tracked, and that is the lowball estimate).
I mention these numbers because commercial mass market software is a huge industry. But it is still an artform. A craft. It is not something you can learn in a college. Its almost something you have to be born with. Like chess playing. Craftsmanship may be related to IQ, but when IBM hired the smartest people they could find in the 1950s they sucked at programming after training. Its an art. And with artists you do have Prima Donnas, and you better treat them properly and with due respect.
That is why you have no After Dark screensavers for sale nor working on OS X.
slomacuser
Well-known member
wow, really enjoyed reading this AD post and would be happy to se the After Dark modules run on OS X too my best one are the early ones with Zot and Nocturne, the Star Trek and Simpsons ... anyway I have just found an App that can run Lunatic Fringe on OS X
my best one are the early ones with Zot and Nocturne, the Star Trek and Simpsons ... anyway I have just found an App that can run Lunatic Fringe on OS XDriverguru
Member
slomacuser,
if you like really early After Dark screensavers you can already run them in OSX and run them as a full screen screen saver, stopping it by eventually moving mouse or using keyboard), and selecting your own inactivity start timer too.
"Really?" you ask? Yes. I tried it an hour ago. I downloaded a copy of "DarkSide of the Mac 5.0.6" which has a ton of algorithmic screen savers.
I installed it by running its installer, on a machine with Mac OS 9.2.2 on it running in OSX 10.4.11 on a set of PowerPC chips. Then on the hard drive i double clicked on Darkside. worked fine.
Then i ran its settings menu option and played with all the little screensavers on a 1680 pixel wide screen
nearly all ran!
Then I gave permission in Darkside to change screen depth (i have it at 32 bits, not 256 normally).
Then all of them ran except 2 or 3 that gave a error that said I needed QuickDraw GX installed. ( I thought i had it installed, but oh well).
I did not try any official After Dark modules. some early ones should work.
I then set time to 15 seconds and "random" after jacking up every setting to most complex and most objects in each screen saver.
Interestingly they all used most of my screen properly.
Darkside comes with about 49 screen server plugins and source code to two examples for people to start writing their own.
Its not a full solution, but a few of them were very mesmerizing when made to do a lot of work.
Some of them required 256 color mode, but the screen saver under osx swapped resolutions back and forth without any effort, though had a few seconds of delay.
-------
The proper full solution is to get Basilisk 2 compiled and hacked and customized to run AfterDark 4 engine or something similar, so that all the other modules can get running from the 10 or so other collection sets.
Then OSX can run every module as a screen saver, not just these oldest ones, and not just on PowerPC machines in 10.4 or 10.3
if you like really early After Dark screensavers you can already run them in OSX and run them as a full screen screen saver, stopping it by eventually moving mouse or using keyboard), and selecting your own inactivity start timer too.
"Really?" you ask? Yes. I tried it an hour ago. I downloaded a copy of "DarkSide of the Mac 5.0.6" which has a ton of algorithmic screen savers.
I installed it by running its installer, on a machine with Mac OS 9.2.2 on it running in OSX 10.4.11 on a set of PowerPC chips. Then on the hard drive i double clicked on Darkside. worked fine.
Then i ran its settings menu option and played with all the little screensavers on a 1680 pixel wide screen
nearly all ran!
Then I gave permission in Darkside to change screen depth (i have it at 32 bits, not 256 normally).
Then all of them ran except 2 or 3 that gave a error that said I needed QuickDraw GX installed. ( I thought i had it installed, but oh well).
I did not try any official After Dark modules. some early ones should work.
I then set time to 15 seconds and "random" after jacking up every setting to most complex and most objects in each screen saver.
Interestingly they all used most of my screen properly.
Darkside comes with about 49 screen server plugins and source code to two examples for people to start writing their own.
Its not a full solution, but a few of them were very mesmerizing when made to do a lot of work.
Some of them required 256 color mode, but the screen saver under osx swapped resolutions back and forth without any effort, though had a few seconds of delay.
-------
The proper full solution is to get Basilisk 2 compiled and hacked and customized to run AfterDark 4 engine or something similar, so that all the other modules can get running from the 10 or so other collection sets.
Then OSX can run every module as a screen saver, not just these oldest ones, and not just on PowerPC machines in 10.4 or 10.3
Driverguru You are possibly the sole reason I survived Elementary school. My religious beliefs, I often did not participate in entire class units, and would be sent to the library, all alone. There, I played with You bet your head, and evantually YDKJ when the school upgraded to PowerPCs. Heh. Its a small world, now isnt it? Recently I went to a thrift store and saw YDKJ on the shelf for $5. I paid it faster than you could EVER imagine. Thanks again. I really appreciate it. Damn I love YDKJ. Its still an excellent game to play with friends
//wthww
//wthww
Scott Baret
Well-known member
I played the demo of YDKJ on the After Dark 3.0 CD and loved it...but only when I got my iBook G3 (since it wouldn't run on my LC). By then it was 2000 and I couldn't find the game at the local stores...if I ever see YDKJ for sale somewhere like wthww did, I'm going to pick it up no matter the cost.
ChristTrekker
Well-known member
Driverguru ... it's almost hard to imagine that you are in fact the real deal. This thread is kind of like visiting the Acropolis and having Apollo descend from the sky to talk with you.
Emulating an entire OS just to run a screensaver sounds, well, incredible. I am no genius programmer for sure, but man that seems like a ton of work for a trivial result. I have no idea what the old AD modules contained, nor do I know what it takes to write an OS X screensaver module, but it seems that there's got to be an easier way than that to make the latter's engine use the former's resources. Maybe on-the-fly, maybe a one-time conversion, I don't know. I suppose it would take some real research into what we have (in AD modules) and what we need (in OS X), which gets into water deeper than I'm going to wade into right now.
I saw my Star Trek AD box sitting on a shelf in my garage as I was working around the house this weekend. Man that brought back memories.
Emulating an entire OS just to run a screensaver sounds, well, incredible. I am no genius programmer for sure, but man that seems like a ton of work for a trivial result. I have no idea what the old AD modules contained, nor do I know what it takes to write an OS X screensaver module, but it seems that there's got to be an easier way than that to make the latter's engine use the former's resources. Maybe on-the-fly, maybe a one-time conversion, I don't know. I suppose it would take some real research into what we have (in AD modules) and what we need (in OS X), which gets into water deeper than I'm going to wade into right now.
I saw my Star Trek AD box sitting on a shelf in my garage as I was working around the house this weekend. Man that brought back memories.
salgernon
New member
Hey Jim,
What was the change?
Hey everyone else,
Greg Parker (now at Apple as the objc runtime guru) has written a Mac OS X wrapper for Lunatic Fringe, although I haven't tried it yet:
http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/
It would be fairly trivial to get the original after dark 2.0 modules to run emulated, since they mostly relied only on quickdraw calls or direct framebuffer access. But Star Trek and Disney and the other "licensed property" module sets played a lot of tricks with memory that would be a pain to emulate. Patrick Beard and I wrote a 68k dynamic linker based on the Think C library format (so in MultiModule, you would truly be running shared code with independent a5 worlds per module!)
Anyway, I came to this thread hoping to find a copy of TMON for nostalgia's sake - but its always good to see one's software still in use!
Cheers,
--sma
(Steve Algernon, formerly Steve Zellers; changed my name when I remarried)
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