The Psychedelic Screen Saver Collection - Version 2.0 Copyright (C) 1995-1996 All Rights Reserved http://www.halcyon.com/pixel/psych.htm By Mike Irvine EMAIL: pixel@halcyon.com This file contains a number of the questions that I get asked frequently by people using the Psychedelic Screen Saver Collection. 1) How come the colors don't "shift and undulate" in high/true color display modes? While the screen savers should still work in high/true color modes, you will only get palette animation in 256 color video modes. In order to get some of the effects that they use, the screen savers use a palettized video mode. This means that colors are referenced by index rather than by RGB value. By using a palettized video mode, the screen savers can change the RGB value that corresponds to a particular palette index and the result is that all of the colors on the screen that use that index are immediately updated. Neither high or true color modes use a palette, so it is not possible to achieve the effects without manually updating the entire display. Since updating the entire display is far too slow, I didn't code the screen savers to do it. On the bright side, Windows 95 supports dynamic video mode switching which means that the display mode can be changed without rebooting the system. Unfortunately, most of the drivers that are available now don't handle changes to different pixel depths very well. Once the video driver writers get their act together, I'll setup the screen savers to change to a palette based video mode when they start up and then change back when they are done. However, until then, we're stuck with the limitation :-( 2) How can I capture the images that the screen savers generate so that I can use them for my wallpaper, WWW pages, etc. Well, on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 you can just press the "Print Screen" key and this will copy the image to the clipboard. From here, you can paste the image into your favorite image processing application and save/edit it. On Windows NT, after the screen saver time-out period, the OS switches over to a secure desktop and then runs the screen saver. Because of this, pressing the "Print Screen" key will terminate the screen saver rather than copying the image to the clipboard. In order to avoid this behavior, you can run the screen savers (*.SCR files are just *.EXE files that have been renamed) from the command line or create icons for them. When you run them this way, you run them on the application desktop and the "Print Screen" key works just fine. 3) Do you do custom screen saver development? No. 4) Once I download the file, how do I set up the screen savers? The file that you've downloaded is actually an archive file that contains the collection of screen savers. In order to extract the individual files, you will need to obtain a program that can extraction files from a ZIP archive. You can probably find a number of these archive programs from the SimTel archive on the internet. The most commonly used archive program is PKZ204G.EXE. In any case, once you have used the archive utility to extract the files from the archive file, follow the instructions in the README.TXT file on how to setup the screen savers.