Eyecandy: Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp.

News

• 2019-04-28

  Just a minor update to correct the Magic Mirror video, add the Linux SDL port of Timeless, fix Tom's Plasma discussion, and clean up a few other links. Hoping to get back to archiving some additional software soon.

• 2015-06-07

  It's been a while since an update here. The site has been transfered to it's own top-level domain http://eyecandyarchive.com. I'm still working through some run-around related to that, but hope to get some new content up here soon.

  One minor update that did occur recently, was that the Fractint package was updated to account for some minor issues in it's initial implementation (i.e. silent image complete tone, etc.).

• 2014-6-23

  It's been a few weeks since the last update here. Here's a few more bits of MS-DOS eyecandy for everyone.

  • Ooze: A plasma fractal generator / palette cycler.
  • Pixelz: A random walk pattern generator.
  • Rainbow Swirl: Scintillating rainbow swirls.
  • Remi: A set of four plasma and shader bob patterns.
  • Sine: Generates spinning dot patterns based on sine waves.
  • Snow Fall: A Moiré pattern pattern zoomer.

  I think I'm coming close to the end of the line with MS-DOS eyecandy. There are a few things left to cover, but at this point I'm mainly compiling a list of things that didn't make the grade to post. I'll probably provide some sort of in brief coverage of those at some point down the line, but mainly it's to avoid repeatedly investigating things. Please let me know if there are things of significance I have missed, but I think I've covered even most of the minor players at this point.

  This won't be the end for MS-DOS eyecandy coverage, but it does mean I'll move on to hitting some more modern eyecandy in the next updates.

• 2014-5-6

  So this is a fairly large update, as I didn't push out the update from mid-April, so the two updates below are new too.

  I've moved to using a separate, Eyecandy Archive YouTube Channel for the site. Unfortunately since YouTube provides no means to move videos between channels IDs/links for videos will have changed.

  I've also started to use the xBR filter for some MS-DOS titles (i.e. Explosiv, Northern Lights, Morning Star, etc.). The current xBR filter compatible with DOSBox doesn't smooth gradients as the HQx filter will, so it's primarily used to smoothly scale up line art images, producing smooth lines for a wider variety of angles than HQx. A recent xBR update appears to smooth gradients, but it is currently only compatible with emulators supporting multi-pass shaders.

  One other quick update on something not MS-DOS related. While searching for details on Martin from a prior update and Hopalong fractals in general, I found a very cool 3d, WebGL implementation: Barry Martin's Hopalong Orbits Visualizer, which renders the Hopalong fractal while flying along a 3d path. It's definitely one of the best WebGL visuals I've seen recently.

• 2014-5-5

  For this update we'll cover some 16 color (i.e. 4b) VGA MS-DOS eyecandy. There are many of these but I'm reticent to cover too many others, since with only 16 colors and often without palette manipulation most don't make my grade for being "eyecandy".

  • Explosiv: A collection of effects by Reidar Gresseth and Chris Hook, including a number of nice fractal effects: IFS, L-System, Hopalong, and Popcorn.
  • Firedots: A fireworks saver by Ed T. Toton III.
  • HTScr: A collection of effects by Henrik Tingström.
  • Night Bird: Glacierpoint Software's flying birds.
  • Sparkwood: Glacierpoint Software's fireworks.

• 2014-4-14

  OK, back to the MS-DOS eyecandy. This update will all be kaleidoscopic object spewers, eyecandy that outputs random picture elements into a mirrored environment. The best of these is likely Razzle Dazzle, which was covered back in February (at least it's shareware MS-DOS version).

  • Blaze: The first peice of eyecandy prodcued by Ed T. Toton III (aka Necrobones).
  • Dazzle: A piece of eyecandy from the developer of California Games for the Atari 2600, Michael Peter Engelbrite.
  • Lumen: Eyecandy that spews nested boxes. It's author, Terry Dorff, was tragically murdered.
  • VGA Magic: Probably more of a line bouncer than an object spewer, though it's random walk mode probably qualifies.

  I'm hoping that now covers most of these, though I'm pretty sure there are numerous others.

• 2014-4-12

  Just a random update of more MS-DOS eyecandy, but this update does return Stripsky to availability online.

  • DBVGA: A program by Dinh Bang that renders patterns of concentric squares. Nothing against Dihn, but I have to admit to being reminded of the fake airline pilots names from Asiana Flight 214.
  • Knorre: An animated Julia fractal generator. Another production of Egil Stevens from The Floating Point, who also brought us Lorre.
  • Martin: A Hopalong fractal generator by Alan Meiss.
  • Stripsky: Eyecandy based on tiling bits from a input TIFF image. Thanks again to Stein Eikesdal for providing access to this software, as all other references to once online seem to be gone. Also thanks to David Scruton, Stripsky's author, who promptly responded to queries regarding Stripsky. Hoping his storage unit search for Stripsky materials is successful.

• 2014-4-11

  Spent some time converting the ANSI Box-Drawing Characters in the various documents posted here, which were displaying as various accented characters rather than the intended boxes, over to Unicode Box-Drawing Characters so they will display as intended.

  Let me know if there is a tool to automate such. This time I handled it with with search and replace, which was a pain.

• 2014-4-7

  This update will consist of a few programs I'm unable to find much info on. They all provide interesting graphics output, but came without documentation and seem to have few to no references of them left online.

  • Aux2: A really cool piece of eyecandy, though it's origin is a complete mystery.
  • Kplasma: A plasma fractal generator / color cycler by Ken Martindale.
  • Stian: A set of four VGA effects by Stian Grønland.
  • VGA Stuff: A set of four VGA effects by Ken Martindale.
  • Ypnonic: A field lines palette cycler by Nicolas Bourdin.

• 2014-4-2

  Another small update, covering a few early pieces of SVGA eyecandy I had almost forgotten about from the Over the Edge collection.

  • Magic Mirror by Daniel Baumberger and Ken Maupin
  • Northern Lights by Daniel Baumberger and Ian Greenhoe

  These were the first pieces of SVGA MS-DOS software I had ever seen. I also think Northern Lights was one of the first pieces of software I downloaded from a BBS. I had wanted it to test out the SVGA capabilities of the 2Mb Paradise video card in my first MS-DOS PC. Windows, at the time, didn't offer much in it's 256 color modes, besides it's 256 color wallpaper...

  

  So I had gone looking for something, anything, to take advantage of the high resolution displays and colors my PC could output. Things were fairly limited in the MS-DOS space as well, so my initial take aways were only Northern Lights and some of the Moraffware titles. Moraffware let me down, but I did spend a long time staring at Northern Lights.

  There are apparently 3 other pieces of software in the Over the Edge collection: Color Rings, Plasma, and Color Circle. However, I don't think they weren't released as individual shareware titles and may have only been available to registered users. In any case, I've haven't been able to find copies of them online.

• 2014-4-2

  I need to thank Stein Eikesdal (aka Stone Oakvalley). Stone provides a portion of his site, stone-oakvalley-studios.com, describing Tekno Magazine, a Norwegian computer software and games magazine from the mid-90's.

  The magazine used to include pack-in CDs, which, for a few months, included an eyecandy software section. I was initially simply pleased to see that they had included some of my software, but also noticed a number of pieces of software (i.e. Aux2, Lumen, Stripsky, ...) that no longer seemed to be readily available on the Internet anymore.

  Stone was able to provide me access to the software. In the coming weeks I'll add some of it here, making it available again.

• 2014-4-1

  A small update, this time Morning Star by Christopher Antos. It started as the VGAMoire screensaver, a simple line bouncer, but was renamed to Morning Star when a number of alternate saver modules (Lightning, Sierpinski triangles, etc.) were added. Unlike most other MS-DOS eyecandy, Morning Star actually operates as a screensaver: running as a TSR: monitoring mouse/keyboard use; starting up post inactivity; and restoring the former program/display upon usage.

• 2014-3-17

  Moving right along...

  • Maelstrom, which draws patterns based on equations describing electric fields.
  • FractKal, a fractal based image generator by Richard E. Barlow.
  • Fractint, the classic fractal generator.
  • HOP - Fractals in Motion, an animated strange attractor fractal generator.
  • Plasma Collection, a collection of plasma effects that covers most of the other plasma eyecandy effects here.
  • Polygon, a "Mystify" clone also by Richard E. Barlow.
  • Tom's Plasma, a Plasma fractal animator / palette cycler.

  I'm a little light in my coverage for some of these, but expect to go back for a more detailed look at some of them in future.

• 2014-3-1

  OK, let's try to close out most of the MS-DOS eyecandy. We have:

  • Flowfire, a flame simulator by Hugo Elias.
  • Digital Lava Lamp, a color cycling image painter by Keith P. Graham.
  • Lorre, a rotating Lorenz-attractor by The Floating Point.
  • NeonLite, a color cycling image painter by Richard E. Barlow.
  • O-My-God, an escapee of IBM Research Labs.
  • Plasma, an animated plasma similar to and inspired by JCL Plasma, but with subtle improvements.
  • VGA Glow a Perlin noise color cycler.

  In other exciting news, I'm now able to provide a patched version of Dial8 that properly supports it's 376x564 (Mode 11), which was previously broken.

  Just a few more pieces of MS-DOS eyecandy to cover now.

• 2014-2-26

  OK, lets cross off most of the more popular MS-DOS eyecandy I want to cover: LSDino, Plasma-Wave, and Vortex. Next I'll probably try to close out the less popular MS-DOS eyecandy, so we can start to move on to more modern software.

• 2014-2-24

  Moving on through the MS-DOS eyecandy mainly alphabetically, we have: Aeon, Color Fusion, Dial8, Farout, and JCL Plasma.

• 2014-2-20

  Next up, Tomasz Piotr Pytel's (aka Tran's) trilogy of eyecandy demos: Timeless, Ambience, and Luminati. Thomas, probably most famous for his PMode DOS extender, also produced these three alternative demos, which ran infinitely as opposed to other Scene demos that normally only run for a few minutes.

  Unfortunately, due to their custom VGA modes I wasn't able to appropriately capture video for the later two. Instead, I've linked to some VGA capture card video from Michael Huth, who provides video for a wide array of PC demos.

• 2014-2-15

  Now that the main site related coding is done I can get on to covering more eyecandy. This time we'll cover most of the SVGA, MS-DOS eyecandy: Elements, Rave, and 2ynesthesia. A page has also been added for Razzle Dazzle, one of the few commercial pieces of MS-DOS eyecandy.

  Disqus discussion threads have been added to each page, so comment away if you have anything to say.

• 2014-2-12

  Welcome to eyecandy.gnugget.net. The site has had a major overhaul since its former state and now is well slathered in HTML5/CSS3 goodness.

  I intend to cover a wider variety of eyecandy software, beyond the programs coded by myself. I'll likely cover older MS-DOS stuff at first, since such has become more difficult to find/get running. The first of those would be Noah Spurrier's Acid Warp, and probably one of the earliest pieces of eyecandy Tunnel.

  The update also marks the release of Web Kplasma, an updated version of my MS-DOS eyecandy concepts running under browsers supporting WebGL.

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