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Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS
Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS
In the ’90s, Berkeley Systems’ After Dark screen savers brought Flying
Toasters, Fish, and Starry Skylines to Macintosh screens everywhere. They served a
practical purpose in preventing burn-in on
CRT monitors, but also entertained, with animations that could be funny, surreal,
beautiful -- sometimes gross.
Running After Dark modules in the present day has involved fussy configuration of
Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware. Even then, no single emulator or vintage computer
can faithfully run every module: some animate too fast, some too slow.
Afterglow is an emulator built specifically for running After Dark modules -- the
original 68k module code, not a remake or port -- with no dependencies on ROMs or classic
Mac OS. Created in the spirit of software preservation, it makes After Dark easy to
enjoy today and for years to come.
Modules aren’t included, but importing is easy: drag and drop module files, disk images,
or compressed archives into the app and Afterglow extracts and imports them automatically.
Whatever you have, if there are modules in there, you can probably drop it into Afterglow.
You can also browse and install software releases directly from the Internet Archive
without leaving the app.
The joy of screen savers is in the surprise and delight of returning to your computer
and seeing something unexpected: a psychedelic fractal, a procedurally generated
mountain landscape, a Bad Dog defiling your desktop.
Afterglow includes a screen saver module for modern macOS, allowing you to run any of
the classic modules you’ve imported.
The Liquid Glass lock screen has never looked better!
Powered by the Musashi 68k CPU
emulator, Afterglow reimplements just enough of the Macintosh Toolbox and OS APIs to
run After Dark modules.