When I was a kid I really liked this After Dark screensaver, and I recently had a burst of nostalgia. Because I'm pedantic, I was missing the specific 1996 version, not "Flying Toasters" (1990) or "Flying Toasters Pro" (1994), because kid-me had the version with conga lines, future toaster-satellites, and a toaster with a bagel for eyes.
They both didn't scratch my itch fully, and I had some Fable credits available so I decided to put it to good use.
This reproduction is fully based on the sprites, music, sfx, engine logic of the original screensaver. It has the "gags" (toasters doing something silly), baby mode (which I'm not a fan of, but to each their own), and karaoke.
Claude Fable did a lot of good work, including some basic validation (spinning up a headless Chromium and grabbing console output and screenshots), but I was still needed in the loop. It was really big on magic-number-ing, patching, and "assuming" things and most of my comments that weren't bug reports were pushbacks on it inventing stuff rather than going deeper.
As per usual when doing old-things-disassembly, I marveled at how much rich logic this tiny binary has, e.g. the "gags" that involve multiple toasters (airshow squadron split-off) initialize regular toasters, grab them for the gag, then release them into individual units when done. On the other hand, they didn't have weighted random, and I kept wondering why 10 entries in the flight-act table were identical (loop-de-loop) until I realized it's the same act, and they wanted it 10x more likely to be picked.
Backslasher•1h ago
I saw Bryan's CSS version (https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/flying-toaster...), and tried reproducing it with manually-extracted sprites (windows virtualbox -> ffmpeg -> gimp) about 2 years ago, resulting in https://backslasher.github.io/flying-toasters-legacy/
They both didn't scratch my itch fully, and I had some Fable credits available so I decided to put it to good use.
This reproduction is fully based on the sprites, music, sfx, engine logic of the original screensaver. It has the "gags" (toasters doing something silly), baby mode (which I'm not a fan of, but to each their own), and karaoke.
Claude Fable did a lot of good work, including some basic validation (spinning up a headless Chromium and grabbing console output and screenshots), but I was still needed in the loop. It was really big on magic-number-ing, patching, and "assuming" things and most of my comments that weren't bug reports were pushbacks on it inventing stuff rather than going deeper.
As per usual when doing old-things-disassembly, I marveled at how much rich logic this tiny binary has, e.g. the "gags" that involve multiple toasters (airshow squadron split-off) initialize regular toasters, grab them for the gag, then release them into individual units when done. On the other hand, they didn't have weighted random, and I kept wondering why 10 entries in the flight-act table were identical (loop-de-loop) until I realized it's the same act, and they wanted it 10x more likely to be picked.
New code is AGPL (https://github.com/BackSlasher/flying-toasters-reverse-engin...). Extracted art, behavior, audio remain the property of whoever holds After Dark's IP, and are held for archival purposes (see NOTICE).
If you have questions or other AD screensavers you miss, let me know!