Darren Stone's WinXScreensaver mirror

Ever since I posted my article about the substrate screensaver, I've been getting emails of thanks (even though it wasn't my program!). Now, it seems, the author of the substrate screensaver port to Windows has let his website lapse and it's no longer available from there.

Well, that's not a big problem for substrate fans because I mirrored that particular screensaver along with the article I wrote and someone else has also ported it to Windows, as mentioned in the comments in the article above. But it now looks like people want the full program of WinXScreensaver with all the other screensavers and some curious screen-saver management abilities. Having scoured my extensive software archives of "stuff that'll come in useful one day", I have managed to locate a copy of this file (I never delete anything, but that doesn't always mean I can find where I put it. The Linux slocate command is worth its weight in gold as far as I'm concerned).

Given that it's based on XScreensaver which uses the X11/MIT open source license, I assume that the license of the Windows port allows me to mirror it and post it. I also assume that the original porter, Darren Stone of http://tron.lir.dk, doesn't mind me posting a copy here. Darren, shout if I'm wrong.

So, seeing as mirroring old files is now becoming a bit of a hobby for this blog, there is now a copy of the file up at my website.

It's WinXScreensaver1.1-Install.msi that I have, I have no idea if that was the latest version. Archive.org's history of the site is sparse at best. It's definitely an unmodified working version, though, because it's the one that I used to trial the program for something fancy I was going to do on my network. Hopefully people will find this useful. Enjoy! And give credit for the port to both the XScreensaver authors and Darren Stone.

Substrate screensaver

Normally screensavers are disabled the instant I set up a new system and my recent upgrade to Slackware 10.2 was no exception. However, I was looking through the list for a screensaver to test my 3D acceleration to see if my NVidia drivers were working and came across Substrate.

This is a wonderful little screensaver that I find quite beautiful, some say it looks like the evolution of a city from above, others like cracks in a white rock, still others, like a Picasso in progress.

Substrate example images

Either way, it's impressive results from a simple mathematical algorithm. Pity that I can't get a Windows version for my girlfriend as every time the screensaver activates on my machine, she sits and watches it grow.

Edit: I got in contact with the author of a port of XScreensaver, after many, many attempts at trying to find a suitable Win32 version or a version that would compile cleanly under Cygwin or similar environment, and he happened to have a Windows binary of this screensaver just hanging about. So thanks Darren Stone for your help! The version of WinXScreenSaver on his software page didn't have it when I tried but he pointed me to a version of just that screensaver that he had compiled some time ago: http://tron.lir.dk/software/w_substrate.zip

(As of late-February 2008, the above website appears to be down. For now, there is a mirror of this file here: http://www.ledow.org.uk/windows/w_substrate.zip