Screen savers are strange, ephemeral things. They show up to guard your monitor from the heartbreak of burn-in while you're away, and then disappear the moment you return. They often provide a little passive amusement too, in the form of fish swimming, stars shooting, toasters flying, or dogs peeing, but some could be coaxed to stick around a bit and provide a little more interactive diversion.
Ad-Free Login - Go Ad. To manage the diverse set of interests at play on public lands. To pander to the 'lunatic fringe' of the Republican Party in an effort to help him forestall leaving. About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators. Many years ago I was a software engineer at Apple, Berkeley Systems (makers of the After Dark screensaver), and various other places. I wrote a couple of things that some people have heard of, like Solarian II (a video game), Satori (a screensaver), and Lunatic Fringe (a video game inside a screensaver). Fringe Player is an application that brings the classic game Lunatic Fringe to Mac OS X. Fringe Player is a native Mac OS X program that controls the Lunatic Fringe screen saver module. It takes the place of After Dark itself. Fringe Player is not a complete screen saver; its sole purpose is to play Lunatic Fringe.
Lunatic Fringe is one such diversion. It's a screen saver module bundled with Mac versions of After Dark released in the early 90s. When it starts, it presents a title screen and a high score table. Like any good screensaver, moving the mouse or pressing most keys on the keyboard immediately dismisses it. But hit the caps lock and you're transported to an incredibly adorable battle for galactic dominance.In Lunatic Fringe, you play a tiny, cutesy, retro-futuristic rocketship tasked with defending the Galactic Fringe from evil purple blobs, mace-wielding alien ships, four-way beach ball launchers and the like. In a bit of departure from similar overhead space shooters, your view remains fixed on your spaceship as objects whiz past. Each game starts you at your home base, which you can frequent to refuel and repair battle damage. As you suffer hits, your ships' weapons, RADAR, engines, turn jets, and such become damaged and eventually rendered inoperable. After a couple of hits, you may find yourself spinning helplessly out of control as your ship is mercilessly pounded by enemy fire. If you manage to escape, your ship will slowly repair itself as long as you have parts to spare. Eliminate every enemy in RADAR range and the next level will begin, repopulating the Fringe with a load of new enemies. Even so, your spaceship inhabits a very sparsely populated universe. The Fringe is a very big place, and enemies and obstructions are so few and far between that for most part, the only indications of motion are the dim, single-pixel stars that pass by in the background. Power-ups, like invincibility and weapon boosts are scattered throughout the vastness of Lunatic Fringe, but they're too few and far between to be particularly reliable. Your only real advantage in the game is the fact that your enemies aren't too bright. Most of them won't bother to pursue you for very long, and their weapons fire can be dodged fairly easily if you keep moving. Marathon session of Lunatic Fringe can last a very long time, so long as the enemies don't score a lucky hit on your engines.
Lunatic Fringe's simple, pre-rendered sprites are colorful and smoothly-animated, with a glossy, plasticky look common to CGI of the era. The sound effects are canned cheers, scream, pops, zaps, thumps, and the like, and they lack any real rhyme or reason. They're aural non-sequiturs which give Lunatic Fringe a whimsical, who-gives-a-shit vibe perfectly in keeping with the tone of After Dark.
Admittedly, there's not much depth to Lunatic Fringe. As you progress through the levels, enemies get only slightly less stupid and more numerous. There's no real objective to meet either, beyond the almighty high score, and you might find yourself losing interest in its repetitive gameplay long before you lose all your lives. Still, it always brought a smile to my face when it would pop up after hours spent banging away at whatever school paper I happened to be working on. Spending a little time each night on the Fringe probably helped me graduate high school.
After Dark may be dead and gone, but Lunatic Fringe lives on in the Lunatic Fringe Player available here for Mac OS X. A web-based version is under development here, but it's a work in progress and it's missing most of the original game's features.
When I was a kid my dad had a Compaq computer. It originally came with windows 3.1. He didn't even bring it to work every day - I sat at home many times playing sim town, when we updated it to windows 95. I remember that there was a screen saver program that had many different screen savers - some of them with disney themes and songs, and one that I really want to see again: Fat guys, Cows and fish bungee jumping. The bungee jump cord would break and then the person or animal would fall into the ground and splash into a bunch of meat and blood. Killer instinct for mac. It sure was fun to watch, but I can't find any references to that any more. Someone, help!
The greatest. Screen saver mode enabled a whole series of 30-second cartoons of Johnny Castaway on his island. All the standard stereotypical adventures are there - fishing, coconuts, failing to be rescued etc. Every 5 minutes or so, there was a reasonably more complicated sketch (about 45 secs-1 min) - with a slapstick punchline. Of course, Johnny never got off his island (he's a direct descendent of the Gilligan line). Once a day, there was a 'special' - a 1-minute or so sketch that told a bit of a story (based on Johnny having a love affair with a mermaid).
Search the history of over 377 billion web pages on the Internet. Software All Software latest This Just In Old School Emulation MS-DOS Games Historical Software Classic PC Games Software Library. RedRiderLunaticFringe Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.4.0. Plus-circle Add Review.
There were 12 'specials' and when joined together told a complete story. We spent hours fiddling with the clocks on our computers so we could get the 'specials' (there were tricks involving setting the clock to 5 mins to midnight, etc). The standard sketches were time-dependent - some were based at night under the moon, and the tide went in and out. There were date-dependent items as well - on St Patrick's day, the island was covered in shamrocks, and there were Christmas, Easter and Halloween themes.
Overall, there were probably well over 100 independent scenes - a lot of the standard, common scenes also have a 'gotcha' version where you think you know what is to occur, only for a switcheroo to happen. It was developed by a company called ScreenAntics in the early 1990s and was never updated after the initial release.
For many years, it was not possible to get a version to run on a more modern OS. Now, recently, some people have developed versions to run on today's systems, so we can all enjoy Johnny in his full pixelated glory.
I had hoped to write about more games in this article, or even to do an issue on games, but it just isn't going to happen. Partly I haven't had time to play too many games (I never do, it seems), and partly I didn't receive responses from companies like Spectrum Holobyte and Maxis. Oh well, too bad on them - now I won't get to say nice things about their programs. Delta Tao and Berkeley Systems however do win out, particularly with Spaceward Ho! And Lunatic Fringe. First, this is my method of deciding if a game is good or not.
I spend a lot of time testing software and writing, and I never lack something productive to on my Mac, so I don't often play computer games. I often try PD/Shareware games and the occasional commercial game, and the true test of a game is if I continue playing it after a couple of test runs. I suspect that this situation is not the norm, so if you have tons of time to play games you may not agree with some of my impressions. Umax scanner 5600 drivers for mac osx. I've been playing three sorts of games these last few months, strategy, arcade, and board games (which generally end up being puzzles of a sort).
In the strategy section I've mainly played Delta Tao's cowboy space opera Spaceward Ho! Over their other entry, Strategic Conquest.
Youtube Lunatic Fringe
Quite frankly, I have more fun playing Spaceward Ho! Strategic Conquest puts you on an island with a single army-producing city. The goal is simple: conquer the other cities on the island, have them produce various types of ships and airplanes, explore the rest of the world, and kill anything you meet. Each army, ship, or airplane gets its own chance to move, and after you've been playing for a while it becomes tedious to attend to all the pieces, even though you can put them to sleep to avoid dealing with them.
Lunatic Fringe Screensaver Download
For me, Strategic Conquest wants too much guidance for actions that may not be interesting, such as directing a tank to drive to a seaport and board a transport ship. Such detail makes Strategic Conquest far more realistic than Spaceward Ho!, which handles more of the routine actions for you, but I guess I'm not interested in too much realism in a strategy wargame. A personal foible, I'm sure, since I never liked the graph-paper wargames as a kid either. If you do enjoy that sort of game, you'll love Strategic Conquest. Spaceward Ho! Avoids the extreme realism with a liberal dose of humor, all in the name of playability.
Planets have wonderful icons that identify whether or not they belong to you or to another player and whether or not they will ever be profitable. When you send a fleet away from a planet or call one back, appropriate cowboy sounds play. In addition, you control everything in Spaceward Ho! With a set of simple bar graphs and an easy click and drag interface, removing it greatly from the blood and guts realism in Strategic Conquest.
One final humanistic note: in Spaceward Ho!, when you colonize a planet, you get a population; in Strategic Conquest, conquering a city lets you decide what sort of war machine it should produce. I'm not going to try to cover Spaceward Ho!
More here since Ken Hancock did an excellent job in his review of it in TidBITS-056. Both Spaceward Ho! And Strategic Conquest can be played over an AppleTalk network, and Strategic Conquest can also be played via modem. As with most computer games, having the computer around when you're alone is great, but beating up on your friends over the network is even more fun.
When I was a kid my dad had a Compaq computer. It originally came with windows 3.1. He didn't even bring it to work every day - I sat at home many times playing sim town, when we updated it to windows 95. I remember that there was a screen saver program that had many different screen savers - some of them with disney themes and songs, and one that I really want to see again: Fat guys, Cows and fish bungee jumping. The bungee jump cord would break and then the person or animal would fall into the ground and splash into a bunch of meat and blood. Killer instinct for mac. It sure was fun to watch, but I can't find any references to that any more. Someone, help!
The greatest. Screen saver mode enabled a whole series of 30-second cartoons of Johnny Castaway on his island. All the standard stereotypical adventures are there - fishing, coconuts, failing to be rescued etc. Every 5 minutes or so, there was a reasonably more complicated sketch (about 45 secs-1 min) - with a slapstick punchline. Of course, Johnny never got off his island (he's a direct descendent of the Gilligan line). Once a day, there was a 'special' - a 1-minute or so sketch that told a bit of a story (based on Johnny having a love affair with a mermaid).
Search the history of over 377 billion web pages on the Internet. Software All Software latest This Just In Old School Emulation MS-DOS Games Historical Software Classic PC Games Software Library. RedRiderLunaticFringe Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.4.0. Plus-circle Add Review.
There were 12 'specials' and when joined together told a complete story. We spent hours fiddling with the clocks on our computers so we could get the 'specials' (there were tricks involving setting the clock to 5 mins to midnight, etc). The standard sketches were time-dependent - some were based at night under the moon, and the tide went in and out. There were date-dependent items as well - on St Patrick's day, the island was covered in shamrocks, and there were Christmas, Easter and Halloween themes.
Overall, there were probably well over 100 independent scenes - a lot of the standard, common scenes also have a 'gotcha' version where you think you know what is to occur, only for a switcheroo to happen. It was developed by a company called ScreenAntics in the early 1990s and was never updated after the initial release.
For many years, it was not possible to get a version to run on a more modern OS. Now, recently, some people have developed versions to run on today's systems, so we can all enjoy Johnny in his full pixelated glory.
I had hoped to write about more games in this article, or even to do an issue on games, but it just isn't going to happen. Partly I haven't had time to play too many games (I never do, it seems), and partly I didn't receive responses from companies like Spectrum Holobyte and Maxis. Oh well, too bad on them - now I won't get to say nice things about their programs. Delta Tao and Berkeley Systems however do win out, particularly with Spaceward Ho! And Lunatic Fringe. First, this is my method of deciding if a game is good or not.
I spend a lot of time testing software and writing, and I never lack something productive to on my Mac, so I don't often play computer games. I often try PD/Shareware games and the occasional commercial game, and the true test of a game is if I continue playing it after a couple of test runs. I suspect that this situation is not the norm, so if you have tons of time to play games you may not agree with some of my impressions. Umax scanner 5600 drivers for mac osx. I've been playing three sorts of games these last few months, strategy, arcade, and board games (which generally end up being puzzles of a sort).
In the strategy section I've mainly played Delta Tao's cowboy space opera Spaceward Ho! Over their other entry, Strategic Conquest.
Youtube Lunatic Fringe
Quite frankly, I have more fun playing Spaceward Ho! Strategic Conquest puts you on an island with a single army-producing city. The goal is simple: conquer the other cities on the island, have them produce various types of ships and airplanes, explore the rest of the world, and kill anything you meet. Each army, ship, or airplane gets its own chance to move, and after you've been playing for a while it becomes tedious to attend to all the pieces, even though you can put them to sleep to avoid dealing with them.
Lunatic Fringe Screensaver Download
For me, Strategic Conquest wants too much guidance for actions that may not be interesting, such as directing a tank to drive to a seaport and board a transport ship. Such detail makes Strategic Conquest far more realistic than Spaceward Ho!, which handles more of the routine actions for you, but I guess I'm not interested in too much realism in a strategy wargame. A personal foible, I'm sure, since I never liked the graph-paper wargames as a kid either. If you do enjoy that sort of game, you'll love Strategic Conquest. Spaceward Ho! Avoids the extreme realism with a liberal dose of humor, all in the name of playability.
Planets have wonderful icons that identify whether or not they belong to you or to another player and whether or not they will ever be profitable. When you send a fleet away from a planet or call one back, appropriate cowboy sounds play. In addition, you control everything in Spaceward Ho! With a set of simple bar graphs and an easy click and drag interface, removing it greatly from the blood and guts realism in Strategic Conquest.
One final humanistic note: in Spaceward Ho!, when you colonize a planet, you get a population; in Strategic Conquest, conquering a city lets you decide what sort of war machine it should produce. I'm not going to try to cover Spaceward Ho!
More here since Ken Hancock did an excellent job in his review of it in TidBITS-056. Both Spaceward Ho! And Strategic Conquest can be played over an AppleTalk network, and Strategic Conquest can also be played via modem. As with most computer games, having the computer around when you're alone is great, but beating up on your friends over the network is even more fun.
A friend and I played Spaceward Ho! Over the network for about 6 hours straight before being pulled away by a prior commitment. Sparkchess 6 full version. Luckily we resumed later that night so I could take over the universe. Both Strategic Conquest and Spaceward Ho! Can be fast paced in big games, but nothing beats Lunatic Fringe for good clean arcade action. Lunatic Fringe's main claim to fame is that it is actually a screen saver in the More After Dark package (an excellent package in its own right, and a good present - whoops, that reminds me I have to order it for my uncle; don't tell him). Programmed by the talented Ben Haller of Solarian II fame, Lunatic Fringe is essentially a jazzed-up, weirded-out version of Asteroids, complete with some of the best sounds this side of Spaceward Ho!
And the meanest enemies around. If you like jetting around the known, though fairly small, universe avoiding asteroids and numerous types of nasties while collecting yummies and points, you'll find little more enjoyable than Lunatic Fringe. Just don't let anyone accidently move your mouse while you play. Evidently I destroyed one of Adam's best games by jiggling the mouse pad at a bad moment. To those who complain that a screensaver shouldn't be a game, I say 'Humbug!'
Lunatic Fringe Screensaver Game Over Free
Screensavers are fun, and Lunatic Fringe is fun, and if you don't like it your monitor might have an off switch that works as a screensaver and conserves energy too. Tile's Play bridges the gap between the previous category of arcade games and the next category of board games. The game resembles those slide puzzles with one piece missing, although in Tile's Play each piece has one of several tunnel sections on it.
You must move the pieces around, connecting the correct ones to form a tunnel, a task which wouldn't be easy even if you had a lot of time. You have more than a time limit, though. After you've been working a short time, a small yellow ball starts rolling from one corner of the screen through the tunnel you've built for it to the other corner of the screen. It doesn't roll quickly, but there's no way to stop it (short of creating a tunnel loop, I guess). Lest that seem too easy, some tiles are locked in place (luckily clearly marked), and there are two other entities that travel in the tunnels and appear in higher levels.
Lunatic Fringe Screensaver Game Over Download
The first just tries to eat your yellow ball and you have to make sure to keep it out of the tunnel you're building. The second doesn't hurt your ball, but can randomly cause tunnel sections to mutate, ruining your carefully-laid plumbing. You'll find Tile's Play a twisty, stressful game as you struggle to get your yellow ball to the other side of the screen, and little is more nerve-wracking then when you have to move the tile that actually holds the rolling ball so it can bridge an otherwise fatal gap. Tile's Play is $15 shareware from Suresh Kumar and currently requires a color monitor. Highly recommended. In the straight board game section, I usually find myself playing Stained Glass, $25 shareware from Nick Schlott. Like Tile's Play, it appears to require a color monitor.
Unlike most of the other games I've talked about here, Stained Glass is not intuitively obvious. It resembles those games where you try to remove all but one peg from the board by jumping one over another repeatedly. In Stained Glass, that simple action is complicated by the colors of the panes of glass in the 6 x 12 grid. The grid has three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, and three secondary colors, green, pink, and orange, which are the result of two primary panes being on the same square. Stained Glass has four different types of jumps.
Lunatic Fringe Song
First are those jumps where a primary color jumps over another primary color to an empty space, deleting the jumped pane. Second are the jumps when a primary color jumps over a secondary color that contains a component of that primary color, at which point the component is subtracted.
(Remember which colors make up which other colors? Good, I don't.) The third type of move is when a primary color jumps another primary color, but lands on another primary color after doing so. The jumped pane is deleted, and the pane that is landed on combines with the pane that did the jumping to create another color (that's why you can't land on a secondary color, since blue plus orange equals mud, as the excellent help section tells us). The final type of move is the simplest, where a secondary color like green jumps another secondary color to either land on an empty square or another pane of green.
Free Lunatic Fringe Screensaver Gamecube
In either case the jumped pane is deleted. Hmm, it sounds confusing, but it's actually fun and extremely challenging to play. I wish I was better at colors - I find it difficult to remember all the possibilities and in the process make too many random moves. Delta Tao's pair, Strategic Conquest and Spaceward Ho!, and the More After Dark collection from Berkeley Systems (which requires After Dark 2.0v, by the way) should all be available from your favorite purveyor of commercial software.
Lunatic Fringe Model Company
Tile's Play and Stained Glass you'll have to find on the nets or in a user group's shareware library, but any of these games would make a good present for someone wanting to play games on the Macintosh this holiday season. Information from: Delta Tao documentation Tile's Play documentation Stained Glasss help.
