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Screen Savers

The following are Macintosh ports of screen savers originally created by Terence M. Welsh. In addition, the ports of FieldLines and Helios were based on previous work by UselessSoft, and the port of Skyrocket was based on previous work by Stéphane Sudre and Jason Sonnenschein. All of these screen savers are licensed under the GNU General Public License; source code is available in separate downloads.

All of these screen savers are universal binaries and will work on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macintoshes.

FieldLines 1.1.1 (April 17, 2006)

FieldLines is a screen saver that simulates the electric field lines emitted by charged particles. In this screen saver, ions move around the screen and bind to the lines of other ions as they get close and unbind as they move away. As the original author has said, physics never looked so good. FieldLines is available in English, French, and Italian.

• Required: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
• Required: ATI Rage 128 video card or later

• This version is identical to UselessSoft's version 1.1.0, with the following changes:
• Fixed a bug in the way that FieldLines initialized OpenGL that caused the screen saver to not work under certain video hardware configurations.
• Fixed a typo in the English localization.
• Fixed a problem where the frames were drawn out of sync, which caused video tearing.
• Removed the "check for update" button.
• FieldLines now runs on Intel-based Macs.

Helios 1.4.2 (February 27, 2006)

Helios is a particle attraction/repulsion screen saver where "blobs" emit and receive multi-colored particles. It's difficult to describe, but as some have said about the screen saver, it's pretty insane. Helios is available in English, French, German, and Italian.

• Required: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
• Required: ATI Rage 128 video card or later
• Recommended: ATI Radeon 9000 video card or later, or nVidia GeForce 4 video card or later

• Fixed a problem where the frames were drawn out of sync, which caused video tearing.

Hyperspace 1.1.3 (July 14, 2008)

Hyperspace is a screen saver that sends its users on a virtual trip through a wormhole, just like the ones in some sci-fi TV shows and movies. Meanwhile, nebulas and stars fly by. Hyperspace is available in English, French, and German.

Hyperspace requirements:

• Required: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
• Required: Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later for pixel & vertex shading
• Required: ATI Rage 128 video card or later
• Strongly Recommended: 1.5GHz CPU or faster
• Recommended: ATI Radeon 9000 video card or later, or nVidia GeForce 4 video card or later

• Fixed a nebula discoloration bug that was only occurring under Leopard.
• Fixed a crash that sometimes happened when repeatedly changing settings in System Preferences.
• Added French and German localizations.

Skyrocket 1.3 (October 25, 2007)

There's fireworks screen savers, and then there's Skyrocket. Technology has come a long way since the days of the Pyro! screen saver, and Skyrocket shows how far we've come by rendering fireworks in 3D. Oh, and it also has sound effects to go with the fireworks. And unlike some other fireworks screen savers, this one won't change your screen's resolution. Skyrocket is available in English, French, and Japanese.

Skyrocket requirements:

• Required: Mac OS X 10.4 or later
• Required: Mac OS X 10.5 or later for sound effects on PowerPC Macs
• Required: ATI Rage 128 video card or later
• Recommended: ATI Radeon 9000 video card or later, or nVidia GeForce 4 video card or later
• Required (if you want to use the mouse controls): Two button mouse, or Mighty Mouse with one side configured to alt-click

• Ported the mouse controls from the Windows version to the Mac version.
• Skyrocket is now built with the FreeALUT library, since Apple has deprecated ALUT in Mac OS X's implementation of OpenAL.
• The new minimum OS version is 10.4.
• Finally, the PowerPC version of Skyrocket no longer plays sound effects unless Mac OS X 10.5 or later is installed. I'm sorry I had to make this change, but it solves the PPC sound problems once and for all, and it reduces the screen saver's disk space.

Important notice for Firefox, Mozilla, and Camino users: To download the following archives, you will need to right-click (or Control-click) on the link(s) and choose "save as" in the contextual menu. Safari and MSIE users can simply click on the link(s).

Also, the Skyrocket source code is compressed using 7-Zip in order to conserve disk space. You'll need a 7-Zip unarchiver to extract it.

Download FieldLines
Download FieldLines Source Code
Download Helios
Download Helios Source Code
Download Hyperspace
Download Hyperspace Source Code
Download Skyrocket
Download Skyrocket Source Code (right-click and choose "download linked file", then change the extension back to .7z after downloading)

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