The Complete Animator

Software for your Enjoyment, Creativity, Productivity and Education


Iotas' Screen Saver

  • Can use any film generated by The Complete Animator (including the ones here on our Web site).
  • Available for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT (for x86), and Acorn RiscOS.
  • 32-bit versions (i.e. all except Windows 3.1) are network-aware: if you have two or more computers on a network, you can get them to pass the film between them. No kidding. As far as we know, no other screen-saver in the world does this. It even works if one machine is a PC and the other is an Acorn.
  • The Acorn version is in BBC Basic and is provided so you can see how to use animations in your own programs.
  • The PC versions do not come with source code; there will be a forthcoming freeware package, the Complete Animator Programmer's Kit, including a DLL to let you play animations in your own programs.
The networking features of the screen-saver require a TCP/IP Winsock implementation (on PCs) or the Internet or InternetA module (on Acorns).

Click here to download a Zip archive (122K) containing the PC version, for Windows 3.1 or 3.11, Windows 95 or NT. Click here to download a Spark archive (35K) containing the Acorn version.

The traditional film to use is this (40K) tumbling hourglass, but for some others see our films page.

Copyright notice

PlayBack (on the PC) and !ScreenSav (on the Acorn) remain © Iota Software Ltd., but, unlike The Complete Animator itself, you're free to copy them, and the films you get with them, as much as you like -- in fact, we'd rather like it to get spread as widely as possible!

The HUM1.TCA and T-POT.TCA example films in the PlayBack archive were done by Don Slaven, who has kindly said we can give them away with this software.

If you make a copy of either PlayBack or !ScreenSav, please copy the entirerelevant archive, without modifying any of it. Of course, you're free to distribute films you've made yourself as well!

!ScreenSav is also intended as a working example of how to use animations in your own programs, and thus you can copy or adapt any sections of the program which you feel you need. In fact, it's not really intended as an example of how to write a screen-saver. A "genuine" screen-saver should in theory have a much smaller memory footprint -- by not being in BBC Basic for a start, and by not holding the film in memory all the time.

More extensive developers' information on animation files and how to use them is available here.


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