HowToScr - technical documentation

How to write a windows screen saver

Holistic screen savers - best practice for coding and distributing a saver, including complete C++ source code for several examples.

Fundamentals, nuts and bolts, APIs - the complete technical low-down on screen savers.

Delphi documentation and examples

Borland have instructions in their Tech Info 4534D.

Many of the links at Bart Pelgrim's developer's corner of www.screensavergallery.com relate to Delphi.

Mark R. Johnson has instructions and source code for Delphi2.

Meik Weber wrote an example Delphi3 saver available for download from this web site (weber.zip, 16k)

If you don't know how to program...

If you don't know how to program at all, then you could try using a saver building program. These programs have a limited number of parameters/effects built into them, and your job will simply be to assemble bitmaps and tweak parameters. They typically don't give very good user-configuration dialogs.

• Direct3d Demo Maker is superb! Very customisable 3d stuff. But the free download has very limited functionality.
• Animated Screen is one such program that looks good for assembling images into a slide show or bouncing around or some such.
• Active Media Eclipse is an extremely professional program with a library of thirty odd fancy effects including explosions. The
• alt.binaries.screen-savers newsgroup FAQ has a section near the bottom listing these and other creation tools.

• It might be possible to turn a Macromedia Director project into a screen saver. SAC Technologies wrote a macromedia screen saver program ages ago, but it looks 16bit and hasn't been updated for a long time.

Other screen saver development sites

3rd Eye is a company that will develop screen savers for you in return for money.

Inner-Smile.com's Advertising Saver can be configured to show different text, and images moving around, and animations, and backgrounds.

Bart Pelgrims maintains the developer's corner of www.screensavergallery.com and has a very good collection of links.

Andy Clark has useful bits of help and links for a variety of development platforms including Visual Basic, MFC, After Dark and Delphi.