Almost every town in Switzerland has a rifle range. I live right across the road from the one in my village with the target end pretty much facing my house. So, when the weather is nice, the furious key-clicks of gonzo programming are often accompanied by high-power rifle fire. You know, when it's pretty much aimed your way, gunfire doesn't sound anything like movie sound effects. Since the bullet is travelling faster than sound, the noise kind of "piles up" and arrives all at once, yielding kind of a shhhhhhh-TWHOCK effect...cool.
Anyway, when I decided to abandon Windows software development, I thought it would be fitting to "go out with a bang" by writing a program even more irritating than the Microsoft development tools used to create it. The sound effects that so often accompany my programming provided the perfect inspiration for the Bullets Screen Saver. Having previously saved your screen by smashing rocks into it, it was but a baby step to maximise the life of your monitor by riddling it with bullet holes, accompanied by authentic sound effects including pistol, submachine gun, carbine, assault rifle, shotgun (with and without echo from nearby hills), howitzer, and cannon fire. To conserve Internet bandwidth, Web audio files, including these "sound bytes," are limited to telephone-like fidelity. The screen saver sounds much better, with the "large-calibre" version delivering compact disc quality (if your sound board is up to it).
The Bullets Screen Saver is available exclusively for 32-bit Windows systems such as Windows 95 and Windows NT. Windows 3.1x blows away things just fine without any outside assistance.
After you've downloaded the program archive, extract BULLETS.SCR with PKUNZIP or a compatible archive extract program, copy BULLETS.SCR to your Windows directory (usually C:\WINDOWS), use the Display item in the Control Panel to select Bullets on the Screen Saver page and use the Settings... button to configure the screen saver as you like. By default, the Bullets Screen Saver blows holes in the screen as it existed when the screen saver was activated. You can, from the Settings... dialogue, designate a target bitmap to be displayed, then blown away by indiscriminate gunfire. Please don't select a portrait of a person--that is extremely naughty; even rapacious software entrepreneurs don't deserve such treatment.
Since the large-calibre edition and source code are rather large, I've made them available both directly from my site in Switzerland and a mirror site in North America. If you're in the Western Hemisphere, please use the mirror site; you'll save downloading time and conserve transatlantic Internet bandwidth.