Millennium™ Screen Saver for Windows
Version 1.2
by John Walker
The Millennium™
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 apocalyptic event of your choice (by
default, [Frank] Black Tuesday, January 19th, 2038, when the
Unix time()
value goes negative and six decades worth of software starts doing
crazy things).
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. 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 Millennium.scr c:\windows\system
Windows NT/2000/XP
copy Millennium.scr c:\windows\system32
Just in case, all prior releases
remain available.
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.
If you click directly on the link above, your browser may simply play
the theme and discard it; right click and save the file to your
computer. 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
The original version of this screen saver, released in
1998, counted down the days remaining until
Saturday, January 1st, A.D. 2000, the “start
of the new millennium” according to conventional
wisdom and the Millennium writers, but a
check box allowed the user to change the year to 2001 to
accommodate those perfectly correct but rather tedious
people who insisted that since the first year of the Christian
Era was A.D. 1, the new millennium would not begin until the
first day of 2001. (Let's not even get into details like
the fact that the calendar changed from the
Julian
to the
Gregorian
in the midst of the last millennium.)
Now, even if you think there might be something to this
spooky retrocausality
business, it's still pretty silly to count down to a
date in the past! So, starting with the 2006 release of
version 1.2, the default date for the apocalypse has been changed
to January 19th, 2038 when, at eight seconds after 3:14 in the
morning Universal Time, the
time()
value in the Unix operating system and a multitude of other
software which adopted its convention for date and time will
overflow the 32-bit signed integer field which counts seconds since
the start of 1970 and go negative. What will happen when
software written over a period of more than sixty years
suddenly finds itself transtemporally teleported back into
December of 1901? Beats me, but it's certain to be an
entertaining, if rather nerdy, apocalypse.
But since everyone should be free to choose their own personal
doomsday, you can specify any date you wish, your mother-in-law's
birthday for example, and the screen saver will count off the
days until the dreaded event.
- 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 apocalypse arrives? 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 2038 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
Nietzsche'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 7 of Microsoft Visual C
(Monkey C)
introduces an XML file format for the build instructions for a
program (“project”), supplanting the Makefile which provided at
least a glimmer of hope for portability among development systems.
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
Version 1.0: 28th May MCMXCVIII
Version 1.1: 31st January MIM
Version 1.2: 1st August MMVI
