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.
They are works of art worth preserving.
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.
See it in action
Features
Import all most of the things
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.
macOS screen saver
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!
Dependency-free
Powered by the Musashi 68k CPU emulator, Afterglow reimplements just enough of the Macintosh Toolbox and OS APIs to run After Dark modules.
No Apple ROM or classic Mac OS installation is required.
And more…
- Module controls
- Full-screen mode
- Randomizer
- Multimodule
- 3D box art
- CRT shader
- Resource inspector
- DrawMorph editor