Long After Dark 1.5.2

What's new in 1.5.2

Looks: how the pictures are drawn. The screen saver can now draw the modules' pictures in more than one way. In the settings window, click Look: Sharp pixels at the end of the Stretch to fit the screen row (or press Alt+K) and pick from the menu:

• Sharp pixels, the default: the original, unaltered look, every pixel of the module's picture a crisp square block, the way Long After Dark has always drawn them.
• CRT monitor: the picture as a 1990s VGA monitor showed it, the kind of screen these modules were drawn for: a soft beam that melts dithering and softens jagged edges, faint scanlines, a fine mask and a little glow. It looks best on a 1440p or 4K monitor; on a 1080p one the scanlines are left out.
• Curved CRT monitor: the same, behind curved glass with rounded corners.
• Smooth: outlines redrawn as clean curves and diagonals instead of steps (Hyllian's Super-xBR), for flat cartoon art such as the Simpsons', the Looney Tunes', Disney's, The Far Side's and Dilbert's modules.
• Shader preset: a RetroArch shader preset (.slangp) of your own, drawn by librashader, which you download yourself: Your own shader preset says how.

Ambient glow. The menu's second group, Bars, can fill the bars beside a 4:3 module on a widescreen monitor (Intermission's, Star Wars', Star Trek's or Johnny Castaway) with a blurred, dimmed copy of its picture instead of black.

Nothing changes until you choose it: with Sharp pixels and Black bars, Long After Dark draws exactly as before. The other choices draw on your graphics card, through Direct3D 11, on every monitor, and in the /window for OBS too. Preview shows them; the settings window's small live preview shows the plain picture. If the graphics can't draw a look fast enough (Smooth on some integrated graphics, say), the screen saver goes back to sharp pixels on its own.

For Windows: LongAfterDark-1.5.2-x64.zip holds the three programs. Unzip it anywhere and keep them together; README.txt inside says what to do next. The programs are not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn before running them.

SHA-256 of LongAfterDark-1.5.2-x64.zip: 3756daeed6033444a3f98586d10aec506ee0da31e7b5ce8c48c5c6797cd35790

For Linux: LongAfterDark-1.5.2-linux-x64.zip holds the same programs and longafterdark, the Linux player, which runs them under Wine. It needs 64-bit x86 Linux with glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or later) and 64-bit Wine; README.txt inside says what to do next.

SHA-256 of LongAfterDark-1.5.2-linux-x64.zip: 5ab7255956551d49deac4521bf46e1d648704aa5429894b00ca02fe7d778b148

Full Changelog: v1.5.1...v1.5.2