Improve Penguin Screen Saver

[Guy Macon]

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The Tux penguin screen saver has three problems; it leaves a trail behind him, it causes the screen to scroll, and the big FREESCO is still there. This leaves too many places on the screen showing the same character for too long, which will cause those characters to be burned in to a CRT screen.

The answer is:

[1] Clear the screen upon invoking the screensaver, and don't redraw anything static such as the big block that says FREESCO. If you feel a need to show an ad for FreeSCO during screensave, make it a line of text at the bottom of Tux.

[2] Have the moving penguin avoid trying to move below the bottom row or overwriting the last character of the last row, thus avoiding triggering a scroll.

[3] Make Tux larger by adding a border of space characters around him. These will overwrite the interior characters as he moves, thus erasing all trails.

--
<a href='http://www.guymacon.com' target='_blank'>Guy Macon</a>

<a href='http://www.guymacon.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.guymacon.com/</a>
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[Peppe/Sweden]

[Lightning]

[Guy Macon]

[dilberts_left_nut]

[dingetje]

[TalkingToes]

It's in / b i n / f penguin. That it uses math to bounce around to the edges is kinda cool. Is there no way to predetermine the screen size?

I used to run a BBS mid '90s and could probably come up with something simple too. The Wildcat BBS v3.9 (and v4)came with an ANSI editor that I was decent with (tho not great).

An old trick is to draw Tux with a black space around him (outside/inside each character including up/down/left/right/diagonals from each original character). Everywhere. So when moving , the black space overwites the old characters. Movment without erasing anything directly. So tux is not 7 wide, but 9 (with two black spaces outside the wings), not 5 high, but 7 high (top and bottom are 9 black spaces, the inside is black spaces too. next to his eyes are black spaces, so diagonal movement does not drag his neck too.


Thanks again for a great fun toy, err... program.

TalkingToes in Seattle

[Lightning]

[dilberts_left_nut]

[Guy Macon]

[Maine-iac]

[Slowpoke]