Happy New Millenium!

But wait - doesn't the new millenium begin in 2001? Yes, if you're a human, but no if you're a computer. Humans start counting at one, while computers start counting at zero. To a computer, zero is the first number, and one is the second. Since I am a computer programmer, and since computers seem to run our culture, to me we are in the new millenium.

In December we held a contest to give BardsTale.com away for a week. Once all the votes were in, the elders in the Review Board sorted through them for literally hours, and finally, minutes before the dawn of the new Millenium in Skara Brae, all entries were hung on the hallowed walls of the Review Board. The Old Man was preparing to initiate the contest ritual, by where he would stand upon a spinner trap, and begin to violently twirl around with his arm extended outwards. When he stopped moving, whoever's vote was directly in front of him would be the winner. The midnight bell rang! The spinner began its counter-clockwise motion! The Old Man became dizzy! The snare contraption began to slow down! The Old Man passed out! When he awoke, he put his finger back out in front of him, and the entry that he pointed to was immediately taken off of the wall and handed to him. He approached the stand and declared, "Mike O'Hara has hereby won the domain name of www.BardsTale.com for the week of January 14, 2000!"

What does this mean? It means that during the week of January 14, when you bring up www.BardsTale.com on you web browser, you won't get my usual web page, but a web page brought to you by our contest winner! Congratulations Mike!


This month we're going to talk about Bard's Tale Windows Screensavers. As you all probably know, a screensaver is simply a program that runs while you computer sits idle. Its main purpose used to be to spare your PC from "monitor burn", which used to happen if a monitor showed the same thing for hours on end. The image would then be "burned" onto your screen, and no matter what else you looked at, you'd still see a ghost-image of what was previously stuck into your screen. However, monitors of today don't have that problem, and screensavers are now mostly used for entertainment purposes. They also can have passwords to lock up your computer, so some people use screensavers for security. I use one to protect my computer from my two-year-old son Timothy. Without that protection, he'd bring my PC down within seconds!

In September of 1999, I began work on a Bard's Tale Screensaver called "Monster Roster". It's loaded with 121 monsters from the Bard's Tale Series; 20 from BT1, 99 from BT2, and 2 from BT3. Every five seconds it shows a different monster as well as its statistics. The graphics are all taken from the C64 and Apple versions.



Visit the Screensaver Shack in Corinth to download the screensaver, and to get more information.

Well that's cool and all, but how does one go about making their own screen saver?

A screensaver is nothing more than a Windows application (EXE file) that is renamed with an SCR extension. They are called by the Operating System, and passed these different parameters:

/sScreensaver Mode. When the program receives a "/s", it should do it's thing.
/aPassword Screen = Show the "Change Password" screen.
/cOptions Screen = Show the Options Screen
/pPreview Screen = Show a small version of the screensaver in a small window that's bound to the Display Properties window.

You also must code things such as hiding the mouse pointer when the screen saver is up, and making the program stop when the user presses a key or moves the mouse.

There's not too much well-written material about the subject, but I recommend a book called Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Developer's Workshop by John Clark Craig. I bought it only for the twenty-four-page chapter on making screensavers!

I am offering all the source code for this screensaver on BardsTale.com. Play with it - make a better one! Good luck.

I hereby declare January 2000 to be "Play Bard's Tale 1 on an Apple Emulator" month!

You can contact me at WebMaster@BardsTale.com. Until next month, farewell fellow Bard's Tale fans!
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