Thanks to G o o g l e's cache, the text and the animated image from the original are still available.
The links, however, unfortunately won't work, but Ed will find a new home for his page (hopefully) soon.

The Sproingies!! [Sproingies]

The Sproingies!!

It may take a minute for the Sproingies (at right, 107k) to load on your machine. But once they do, they really move! Al and I have written a Sproingies screen saver, but unfortunately most computers don't have the power to run it full-screen at the speed you see here.

However, if you have a Pentium or better machine, you can try it out and see how it goes. On my Pentium I can get 1 or 2 frames per second, fullscreen. Computers are SLOW, aren't they?

Sproingies are written in C, and do all of their rendering with OpenGL. They are known to work with Mesa, a free implementation of OpenGL. There are versions of Sproingies for Linux/Unix and for Windows95.

See also: The Superquadrics web page, and my OpenGL Resource.

Linux, Unix, X11

For these platforms, Sproingies can be compiled into Xlockmore. As of version 4.02, they are part of the official Xlockmore distribution, but you have to enable both GL and Sproingies modes when you compile it. You can get the latest version of this program from ftp.x.org, in the contrib directory.

You can download the source archive here as well:   xlockmore-4.03.tar.gz

Windows 95, Windows NT

The Win95 one should work on WinNT as well, but may not be compatible with older versions such as WinNT 3.x. Sproingies for Win95 use the Microsoft OpenGL DLLs. If you have an older Win95, you may need to get OpenGL32.DLL and GLU32.DLL before it will work. Version 1.2 of the Sproingies adds the ability to have "smooth" sproingies, as well as better explosions and of course MANY more sproingies onscreen at once.

NEW Version: Download Sproingies version 1.2 for Windows 95/NT. Updated June 5th, 1997.

Installation under Windows95/NT: Just drop Sproingies.SCR into your C:\WINDOWS directory (or equivalent) and you should find it in your list of screen savers (Control Panel, Display). In the "real" version (unlike the animation above) the camera "zooms" around from time to time, and sproingies are born and die. It is rendered in realtime, hence the slowness. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes!

Last modified 7/17/97 by Ed Mackey.