von dp am 17.April 97 um 22:37:48:
zu: screensaver von Klaus Fuchs am 17.April 97 um 15:51:50:
Per-Erik Bergman wrote:
>> I'm looking for a program that maks my projector to a screen saver.
>> I have found one called "CineMac", but i'd like to check out some
>> other ones as well.
>>
>> Or is it possible to make a screen saver without these converters?
Andrew Hazelden wrote:
> If you have a mac try Autolaunch Pro. It lets you set any application
> (like your projector) to run after X amount of time or if you move the
> cursor to a hot-spot on the screen. This is not as good to CineMac but
> it works ok....
> CineMac is the best one for making screen savers I have seen as it
> works really well and requires no knowldge from th euser to get it
> working.
Not true.
We're about to release a Mac/PC Enhanced CD title with screensavers
on the Mac side made with AutoLaunch Pro, and PC side using CineMac.
We made this decision because our screensaver uses many external
linked cast members, which Cinemac does not support on the Mac, and
'unofficially' supports on the PC side. (Can you imagine a 4-6M control
panel!)
AutoLaunch Pro is a _great_ product. The author Jon Gotow was very
helpful and effective in customising the app for a very reasonable
cost. It will launch a Director app anywhere in your hard drive, so
you can stick it where it will be out of the way of the user. One
major advantage is that it will also execute the AutoLaunch screensaver
(ie. gamma fade the screen/display an error) if there's not enough
memory to run a 1M+ projector. Cinemac on Windows does the same thing,
but CineMac Mac will attempt to run the 1M+ control panel.
We also tried quite a few other 'cheaper' screensavers on the PC side
including 'Anysaver' that someone else mentioned, but encountered a
_lot_ of problems on Win95 including hiding the mouse, virtual memory
problems and excessive time in returning to the desktop. These problems
didn't happen under Win3x - so presumably, many of the cheaper solutions
haven't been ported over correctly to Win95 yet. Cinemac PC has, and
correctly updates the registry (which is far more important than the
.INI files in W95.)
We installed our external cast members from CD onto the hard drive
using the FileUtil Xtra (which is available from gMatter), and used the
MM Enhanced CD ECDFILE Xobj in conjunction to do some file handling
that FileUtil doesn't support.
The interface on both CineMac and AutoLaunch Pro are very similar, and
dead easy for a non-computer literate person to use. AutoLaunch has
a minor advantage in that you can customise the pretty pictures more.
You can make a screensaver fairly easily under Win3.1 from a projector,
but it doesn't work that well under Win95, and not at all on the Mac.
The above products simply function as the screensaver app, and call
your projector appropriately.
Check them out and make the comparison ...
AutoLaunch Pro - http://www.stclairsw.com/
CineMac - http://www.macsourcery.com/
FileUtil - http://www.gmatter.com/
ECDFILE Xobj - somewhere on http://www.macromedia.com/
Regards,
- Ian
D. Plänitz