MillenniumTM Screen Saver for Windows
by John Walker
The MillenniumTM
screen saver was inspired by the countdown to the
year 2000 which graces computer screens of members of the
shadowy Millennium Group in
Chris Carter's supernatural thriller
Millennium.
Fans of the show, or folks who simply wish to lend a mysterious, apocalyptic, chiaroscuro
ambience to their computer room may find this screen saver "just what they've
seen in a vision".
Within the ouroboros is a countdown of the
time remaining until the millennium (which you can define as starting
in 2000 or 2001, according to your own opinion on that momentous
question).
The image shifts its
position on the screen every 10 minutes to avoid burning the
phosphor in any given location.
The Millennium Screen Saver is available exclusively for 32-bit Windows systems
such as Windows 95 and Windows NT. If you're still running Windows 3.1, you
undoubtedly have an adequate appreciation of apocalyptic events without the
need for a screen saver to remind you of exogenous impending doom.
"Millennium" and
Millennium-related images and sounds are Trademarks
and © Copyright 1997 FOX Broadcasting Company
and must be used in a manner consistent with the
FOX statement of
policy regarding fan websites.
Downloading and Installation
After you've downloaded the program archive, extract the files
it contains with a suitable
archive extract program,
then copy it to the directory where screen savers lurk on your
system, as follows:
Windows 95/98/Me
copy milscrsv.scr c:\windows\system\Millennium.scr
Windows NT/2000/XP
copy milscrsv.scr c:\windows\system32\Millennium.scr
The screen saver is supplied as a file conforming to the DOS FILENAME.EXT
file name convention to allow you to extract it without requiring an
un-ZIP program that understands long file names.
Downloading and Installing the Millennium Theme
If you'd like the screen saver to be able to play
the
Millennium theme music when it starts up and
when you press the Return key, you need to download an audio
(
.wav) file containing the theme and install it in
the system directory where you copied the screen saver,
Millennium.scr. The following link downloads the
Millennium theme
.
If you simply click on this link, your browser will
probably download the audio file, play it through your computer's
speaker, and promptly discard it. To download the file
to your computer, use your browser's "Save link as" or
"Save target as" feature, which is usually accessed by
clicking the right mouse button over the link (details
vary from browser to browser and among different versions
of a given browser--consult your browser's help information
if you need assistance downloading files).
Millennium Theme Audio File
- millenn.wav
- 44.1 kHz stereo, 8 megabytes.
After downloading the theme file, copy it to the system directory
where the screen saver resides (c:\windows\system for
Windows 95/98/Me, c:\windows\system32 for Windows NT/2000/XP).
Configuration
After installing the screen saver, select it
by using the Settings item on the Start menu to
launch the Control Panel, then use the Display icon to launch the
Display Properties panel. Click the Screen Saver tab and click
in the Screen Saver drop-down list to display the screen savers
installed. If you've copied
Millennium.scr into the
proper directory, "Millennium" should appear in this list; select
it. A small sample display will appear in the monitor window
above. Press the Preview button to show the full screen
appearance of the screen saver.
You'll probably want to customise the behaviour of the screen
saver, particularly the occasions on which it makes noise, to
those appropriate to the environment in which you're using it.
Click the "Settings" button to display the screen saver's
configuration dialogue, as illustrated below. Items in
this dialogue are as follows:
- Startup
- These boxes control which sound, if any, the
screen saver makes when it starts.
If Play theme is checked, the Millennium
theme song is played. This is kind of cool when you
first install the screen saver, but it gets old
quickly, especially if you've set the screen
saver wait to a relatively short interval.
Play theme is enabled only if you've
downloaded an audio file for the theme and installed
it as described above.
If Play theme is disabled or
not checked, and Chime is checked, the
"drum of doom" which
punctuates segments in the show sounds instead.
(The drum in the screen saver sounds much better than
the link above, which was converted to monaural and
resampled at a lower rate in the interest of quicker
downloading.) If neither box is checked, the screen
saver makes no sound upon activation.
- Chime at hour
- If this box is checked, the two-beat
"drum of doom" sounds
every hour, on the hour.
- Chime at half hour
- Checking this box causes a single beat from the
drum of doom to herald the half-hour mark.
- Chime on exit
- If checked, the drum of doom sounds when a keystroke or
mouse motion causes the screen saver to terminate.
- Show date and time
- It's not authentic Millennium Group issue,
but nonetheless awfully handy for a screen
saver to display the date and time; it avoids "waking
up" your computer just to check the time, since
you can instead just glance at the screen saver display.
If you check this box, the date and time appear
in discreet dark blue type above the ouroboros.
- Count down to
- According to conventional wisdom and the writers of
Millennium, the next millennium begins
at midnight on Saturday, January 1st, A.D. 2000. But if a millennium is
one thousand years, that's wrong, because there
was no year zero--the year 1 B.C. was followed by the
year A.D. 1, and hence at the start of year 2000, only
1999 years will have elapsed since the beginning of
the Christian Era! At the end of every decade we
must endure nattering back and forth between the "round
number" crowd and the "year counters", but this is
the big one--decade, century, and millennium
all at once, so the debate will be
particularly intense this time. Have it
your way! If you're a member of the 2001 crowd,
just change the year. You can also change the
month and day, permitting the screen saver to count
down to any apocalyptic event you wish: your
mother-in-law's birthday, for example.
- Count today in days remaining
- If this box is checked, the current day is included
in the count of days remaining before the millennium.
If not checked, the count includes only complete days,
starting with tomorrow.
- Test mode
- What will happen when the millennium arrives (other than
all the poorly designed software on your computer thinking
the year is 1900, or in some cases, 1980)? Dunno, but if
you can't stand the wait to see what this screen saver
will do, just check this box, click OK, then use the "Preview"
button to display the screen saver. It will rush through time
at an accelerated rate, showing you what to expect when
"The Time Has Come". Isn't it nice to know there's at least
one piece of software on your computer that doesn't contain a
"year 2000 bug"?
- Image size
- By default, the ouroboros and time remaining are sized
to fill about 2/3 of the shorter dimension of your monitor's
screen. This is comparable to the image seen in Millennium,
and small enough to shift position on the screen occasionally
to avoid burning in the phosphor (the "prime directive" for
a screen saver). If you prefer an image of a different size,
enter the size in pixels in this box. If you set the image size larger than
the smaller dimension of your display, it will be automatically limited
to fit on screen.
Other Millennium-related Sites
uroboros. Also ouroboros, uroborus.
The symbol, usually in the form of a circle, of a snake
(or dragon) eating its tail.
--The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition
The ouroboros is a symbol of renewal, infinity, and the Eternal Return (as in
Neitzsche's philosophy and Poincaré's recurrence theorem for systems
with finite and bounded phase space).
Other Windows Screen Savers at this Site
- Bullets riddles your screen with bullet holes.
- Craters saves your screen by slamming asteroids into it.
- Earth shows our planet from various viewpoints in space.
- Home Planet shows day and night worldwide.
- Sky shows the sky above any location on Earth.
- Slide Show shows images and plays sound files from a directory.
- Terranova creates an endless variety of planets, star fields, and cloudy skies.
Source Code
Experienced C programmers who wish to modify the screen saver or
simply look under the hood to see how it works may download the source
code. You're welcome to use this source code in any way you like, but
absolutely no support is provided--you're
entirely on your own.
Any use of
Millennium-related images and sounds, which are Trademarks
and © Copyright 1997
FOX Broadcasting Company
must be consistent with the
FOX statement of
policy regarding fan websites.
In addition to its wretched quality and unrelentingly hostile user
interface, version 5 of Microsoft Visual C
(Monkey C)
introduces a totally opaque, non-human-readable, and
undocumented file format for the build instructions for a
program ("project"), supplanting the Makefile which provided at
least a glimmer of hope for portability among releases. Since
this "enhanced" project description embeds numerous non-portable
properties of the system on which it was made, one can no longer
provide source code in a ready-to-build form. I have included
"project" and "workspace" files compatible with Monkey C 5.0.
If you're using a different compiler (good for you!), you'll
have to manually create a project, import the files into it, and
set the configuration options appropriately to build a screen
saver. The program should be built as a Win32 application not
using (shudder) MFC. You'll probably also have to add
scrnsave.lib and winmm.lib to the list of
libraries included in the link for all configurations in order
to access the screen saver and multimedia (like, audio
output--oh wow) APIs.
This process will undoubtedly not work the first time, especially
if you're attempting it with a subsequent "improved" release of Monkey
C, in which case it make take dozens, nay hundreds, of attempts
to accomplish what competently implemented development environments
more than twenty years ago routinely did by typing
"make". But hey, why am I telling you this--you're
a Windows application developer! You're
already acutely aware that it's not only Frank Black who has daily,
personal encounters with the very quintessence of evil. This
is who we are.
by John Walker
Last updated: 31st January MIM