Long After Dark 1.6.0

What's new in 1.6.0

Three releases from 7th Level: twenty-three in all, 470 modules. Asked for in issue #3: thank you, @gschmidl.

Release	Year	Modules
Take Your Best Shot	1995	17
Monty Python's Flying Circus Desktop Pythonizer	1995	22
Monty Python's Limited Edition Desktop Extras	1995	2

Take Your Best Shot is 7th Level's "Twisted Arcade Games for Twisted Minds", made of Bill Plympton's animation: 17 scenes that were at once its screen savers and its living wallpapers. Plympton's heads bounce about the screen, drop in and bounce on the floor (Rebound) or fly as clays for a gunner (Skeet). Three are arcade games too, Head Shot, Hot Shot and Line Shot: as a screen saver each plays a demonstration of itself, and Caps Lock starts the game, played with the mouse (Shift+Esc ends it). In the other scenes Caps Lock lets your clicks reach the heads, as Best Shot's interactive screen saver did.

The Desktop Pythonizer is 7th Level's desktop program of Monty Python's Flying Circus: 22 scenes of animation in Terry Gilliam's style, from Silly Walk, Hopping Elephants and the BBC Fairy to Giant Head and Killer Cars. Caps Lock lets your clicks and keys reach any of them, as the Pythonizer's own interactive screen saver did, and that is how its three games are played: The Gopher Game and The Chicken Game with the mouse, The Pig Game with the keys (Enter or Space puts in a coin, the arrows move, Space fires). The Limited Edition Desktop Extras, a floppy that came with Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time, adds two more scenes, Foot and Penguins. They play with the Desktop Pythonizer's player, so they need the Desktop Pythonizer imported too: until it is, the settings window lists them as needing it, and Random leaves them out. Either can be imported first.

None of these is an After Dark or Intermission module: they are scenes of 7th Level's own Runtime Player, a Windows 3.1 program with libraries of its own, which Long After Dark runs unchanged, standing in for the Best Shot and Pythonizer programs that started them.

Importing them. The importer takes each from your own copy, and can download it from the Internet Archive: Take Your Best Shot's CD image (89.1 MB), the Desktop Pythonizer's CD image (181.4 MB; its raw BIN imports too: choose the .bin, not the .cue) and the Desktop Extras' floppy image (1.4 MB). Every import is checked file by file against the original disc or floppy.

Living wallpaper. LongAfterDark.exe /wallpaper plays the modules on your Windows desktop itself, behind its icons and under every window, as Take Your Best Shot's and the Pythonizer's living wallpapers did: /module and /random work as they do with /window, and LongAfterDark.exe /wallpaper /stop ends it and brings your own wallpaper back. Any module works; Best Shot's and the Pythonizer's scenes play their own living-wallpaper form. It is off unless you start it, takes no keys or mouse, pauses while the screen saver runs or the computer is locked, and doesn't keep the display on. It does keep an emulated PC running for each monitor while the desktop shows, which costs processor time and battery all day. Living wallpaper in the README says how to start it with Windows.

Twenty-three covers. The importer's window opens a little wider again, eight covers to a row.

For Windows: LongAfterDark-1.6.0-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-1.6.0-x64.zip: 5eebda4f4223daa5448f36f6b7769535dc43bedaab6d5c8c1f3f59a14bf93e2d

For Linux: LongAfterDark-1.6.0-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-1.6.0-linux-x64.zip: dd1227a39be2df1c016333372cfb81693c72fafb17cc89341bb1501ada3f8200

Full Changelog: v1.5.2...v1.6.0