Eyecandy: Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp.

Northern Lights

Initial Release Date
June 1, 1993
Color Palette
8/18b
Max Resolution
1024x768
License Status
Shareware © Daniel Baumberger and Ian Greenhoe
Platform(s)
MS-DOS
Author(s)
Daniel Baumberger and Ian Greenhoe

Description

Northern Lights renders sets of scintillating, bouncing lines in SVGA resolutions up to 1024x768. It was one of a package of screen savers known as the Over the Edge collection.

Northern Lights is a variation of the classic bouncing lines program. It has a unique feature of having the lines fade in and fade out, like the Northern Lights.

Northern Lights, like many other line bouncers, takes a fairly simplified approach to drawing each set of lines, only drawing 2 lines per update: a black line to erase the line drawn X steps back (50 by default); and a line of the next color. Fading is handled via palette manipulation rather than by rerendering pixels. Since the full set of lines isn't updated each time it performs quickly, but the simple erasure method used overwrites parts of lines not intended for deletion causing subtle black artifacts.

Unlike the other bouncing lines program in the Over the Edge collection, Magic Mirror, Northern Lights is clearly targeted at SVGA displays, not supporting the EGA modes the Magic Mirror does.

Options

Northern Lights supports a variety of options. Some of the less obvious are described below. Refer to the Command Line Reference and Readme in the Documentation section for further details.

Mirror

The Reflection setting controls the number of sets of lines output and their boundary areas.

Bounce

The Bounce setting controls what happens when line vertexes reach the edges of their containing block.

Color Cycling

Northern Lights provides 4 color modes.

Video

Screenshots

Downloads

Documentation

Discussion

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