The 25-Year Success Story of SereneScreen (pcgamer.com) 24
A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.
It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."
Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.
The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.
It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."
Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.
The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.
Oh old times used to use it (Score:3)
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Very true.
But I recently got interested in Samsung's Frame TV (a friend had it in their house and it looks amazing!), and having this run in a picture frame would be quire serene.
https://www.samsung.com/us/tvs... [samsung.com]
Re:Oh old times used to use it (Score:4, Informative)
It's really just a good display but it's just too expensive at $15, I'd consider spending $5.00 and the demo should be freeware
open source alternative https://sourceforge.net/projec... [sourceforge.net]
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Hmm.
"This project does not allow reviews to be posted."
And their site link is dead.
"Aquarium Screensaver says the best way to get help with its software is by visiting http://www.aquarium-screensave... [aquarium-screensaver.com]."
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GIYBF ~ https://sourceforge.net/direct... [sourceforge.net]
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If you have an OLED monitor you at least want a screen blanker to turn the screen black after a minute or two of idle. Because static elements of the screen like taskbars, etc, can be burned into the screen in as little as 200 hours of use.
The compensation routines help a lot, but it's going to do it.
You can have your system auto-lock to a screen blank or power off, but doing it after a minute or two makes it tedious getting back in, so I had
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I downloaded the trial version, and it is indeed gorgeous. We have a funny (to us) video of our cat utterly engrossed in the fish swimming around the dual monitors.
But yes, my screens go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, so a screen saver is essentially worthless.
no Linux version? (Score:4, Funny)
Offtopic screensaver question (Score:2)
But then I recently got an AndroidTV projector. When paused it shows pictures it gets off some Google account or something. It's called Ambient Mode. I managed to get it to show my extensive collection of pictures, it wasn't easy to setup, but only worked for a short while, the options indicated here [google.com] are now gone. Anybody knows how do
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Some screens take a little bit to wake up from sleep, so it's annoying if they do that when you're nearby and referring to something on the screen.
I have my screensaver come on a few minutes before the screen sleep. That way if I'm building a model or something with instructions up, I can see it's starting to snooze and hit a key to stop it, without having to wait for the screens to wake up.
And of course, back in ye olde days, monitors didn't have a sleep function, so screensavers were a lot more important.
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Power saving features didn’t exist back then. Monitor burn in was a real thing especially on monochrome displays.
big fan of LGR (Score:1)
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I wonder if this was the first time LGR was posted in a /. story.
After Dark (Score:2)
The screensaver "After Dark" had a fish aquarium before Windows 95. Saying this because the summary can leave the wrong impression that Windows 95 invented aquarium screensavers.
Re: After Dark (Score:2)
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Another story (Score:1)
Re: Another story (Score:1)
Doesn't have a native linux version (Score:2)
A Really Great Guy (Score:3)
And Jim Sachs did the artwork. I have had the great privilege of working alongside the man, and watching how he works. He's incredibly detail-oriented, polishing every single pixel by hand. Even when Amiga artwork and games were blowing absolutely everything on the Mac and DOS out of the water, Jim's work stood out as something special. He understood the llimitations of the medium, and used them to his advantage.
It would be easy to imagine a man that talented would come off as arrogant, but that's not the case. Jim is a very pleasant, unassuming guy. I suspect some of that comes from his time in the Air Force, where the laws of aerodynamics at 30k feet aren't impressed by your ego. I once watched him draw a brass trumpet on screen. I came back an hour later, and noticed that he'd changed the background color, including all the hand-drawn anti-aliasing against the trumpet. I asked, "Did you just do all that by hand?" and he said perfectly matter-of-factly, "Yeah, the other color didn't work." (Trivia: He eats dessert first. Because life is uncertain.)
It's very easy to find examples of his work online, although they're tiny by today's standards (320 * 200 pixels). But you won't be disappointed. It's long past time for him to get a nice write-up; I'm pleased that Ted Litchfield and PCGamer went to the trouble.
Nice, but ... (Score:2)
I'd rather have images of a real aquarium or other webcams around the world -- perhaps rotating through a configurable set. That wasn't either possible or practical back in the day, so an animated aquarium, etc... was a good alternative, but now is another story, if you're willing to eat the network bandwidth ...