Afterglow brings classic After Dark screen savers to modern Macs
A new project called Afterglow lets modern Mac users run original 68k After Dark screen savers, including Flying Toasters, without vintage hardware or emulators.
After Dark was a collection of screen savers that became a fixture on Macintosh computers throughout the 1990s, originally developed by Berkeley Systems. They were designed to prevent burn-in on CRT monitors while offering entertaining animations. Running these classic modules in the present day has generally required fussy configuration of Mac OS emulators or vintage hardware, and no single emulator or vintage computer could faithfully run every module at the correct speed.
Afterglow emulates the original 68k module code directly, with no dependencies on ROMs or a classic Mac OS environment, according to the project's website. The site notes that After Dark modules themselves are not included, but provides instructions for finding and importing them. Halter said the project was created in the spirit of software preservation, explaining that the screen savers are "works of art worth preserving."
Afterglow includes features such as module controls, full-screen mode, a randomizer, multimodule support, 3D box art, a CRT shader, a resource inspector, and a DrawMorph editor. Halter previously created Lunacy, a native Swift app for playing the classic Lunatic Fringe game from More After Dark on modern Macs.