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.