Babylon 5 Screen Saver and the Macintosh

From the Lurker' Guide:

A B5 screen saver by Sound Source is available for Windows. It can be ordered directly from Sound Source; call 800-877-4778 (US) or +1-805-494-9996. Cost is US$29.95 plus $4.75 shipping for domestic orders.

But what if you have a Macintosh?

Well, I have one and I have SoftWindows for it, so I called Sound source and asked. The person there said that it would run fine, but sound would not be available.

The person was partly right: sound was not available but neither were the movies. (:-(

I have a 50 MHz 68040 Macintosh. It took about four hours to install and Windows runs fairly slowly. I figured that there had to be a better way. So, I poked around while figuring out the interface. I noticed that the images were stored as .BMF files.

Most Mac users are way ahead of me at this point. It turns out, you can access all of the content directly from the Mac:

• Images are stored in the IMAGES directory as .BMF files. These are the same as .BMP files, but with a different extension. A subset of these images are stored in the WALLPAPR directory.
• Sounds are stored in the AUDIO and AUDIO_Q directories as .WAV files.
• Movies are stored in several directories as .AVI files.[*]

So, I use the following programs:

• Graphic Converter to access images.
• SoundApp to access sounds.
• AVI->QuickTime utility to convert the .AVI files to QuickTime movies, then MoviePlayer to view them.[*] (You must make a copy of the data onto another drive.)

Enjoy!

It would probably help if those of you who have Macintoshes told Sound Source that you had one, and that you would like a native Macintosh version...

[*] Not all movies converted properly. If someone ever does a better AVI to QuickTime converter, I assume that they will convert.

Other References

Second Nature offers free Macintosh and Windows screen saver software. It requires JPEG files, but GraphicConverter can create those.

You can use Decor to take a PICT, JPEG, or GIF and make it into wallpaper.

The mentioned programs are available from any INFO-Mac archive.

HyperArchive is a general Macintosh archive index site.