StartMyHome.com Screen Saver for Windows

StartMyHome.com is an online home building community providing the tools and resources to plan, cost and customize your home from concept to completion.

The StartMyHome.com Screen Saver for Windows 95/98 and NT displays a series of images and (optionally) plays a sequence of sound files from a designated directory. Images in JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP formats can be displayed, and full-colour images can be viewed on displays limited to 256 colours. Images too large to display on the screen are automatically scaled to fit. Both wave audio (.wav) and MIDI song files (.mid or .rmi) can be played (assuming you have a sound board, and it includes a MIDI synthesiser). You can configure the rate at which images change and sound files are played, whether images and sounds are chosen at random or are shown in alphabetical order by file name (allowing you to script a slide show), and whether images appear at random positions on the screen to avoid burning in the phosphor or appear centred on the screen. Images and sounds can be played independently or synchronised with one another--the latter option allows you to assemble multimedia slide shows with a sound track for each slide. You can optionally display the date and time and/or the names of the current image and sound files above each image.

Downloading and Installation

Download startmyhome.exe (Self Extracting Zipped archive, 580 Kb)

After you've downloaded the install program , click on it to start the install program which will copy the screen saver to the correct folder for your system.

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 startmyhome.scr into the proper directory, "startmyhome" should appear in this list, select it.

It is essential you configure the screen saver in order to specify the directory containing the image files and (optionally) sounds you wish the screen saver to play. Click the "Settings" button to display the screen saver's configuration dialogue. Items in this dialogue are as follows:

Slide directory

This field specifies the drive and directory containing the images and sounds you wish the screen saver to display. All files in the directory with file types (extensions) of .jpg (or .jif or .jpeg), .gif, .bmp, .png are included in the list of images, and files with extensions of .wav, .mid, or .rmi are considered sounds, the latter two designating MIDI song files. "Why don't you allow me to specify which files are played and in what order?", you ask. There's no need for this, since the file system already provides precisely this capability in the form of a directory! If you want an image or sound file used, simply place it in the designated directory. To specify the order in which files are played, check the "Alphabetically by file name" button for "Play order" and give the files names which sort in the order you want them used. Besides, if the screen saver had its own private list of files, you'd have to reconfigure it every time you added a new image or sound to the directory; this way there's no need for that--simply copy the file into the slides directory and that's that--it will automatically be included in the show when the screen saver starts the next time.

You can either type in the directory name directly (if it's invalid the screen saver will show a warning message when it next starts), or use the "Browse" button to display an open file dialogue. Navigate to the desired slides directory and select any file in the directory and click "OK". The selected directory name will appear in the slide directory edit field. You have to pick a file because the open file dialogue does not understand the concept of choosing a directory.

Play order

You can show the slides and play the sound files either in a random sequence, different every time the screen saver starts and re-shuffled after every image has been shown or sound played, or alphabetically by file name (the same order in which "DIR /ONE" lists them by default). If you're using this to set up a slide show which plays in a particular order, note that if you have, say, 20 slides you'd want to give them names like "sld01.jpg", "sld02.jpg",... "sld10.jpg", "sld11.jpg",... "sld20.jpg". If you left out the leading zeroes in the slide numbers then, for example, all the "sld2x.jpg" slides would sort before "sld3.jpg", which is probably not what you had in mind.

Screen position

The whole reason for a screen saver is to keep a constant image from being "burned in" on the phosphor of your monitor's screen. To achieve this goal, by default the screen saver shows successive slides at random positions on the screen (making sure the image isn't clipped by the edge of the screen, of course). If you're more obsessed with symmetry than the health of your monitor (or you have a non-CRT display that's not vulnerable to phosphor burn), check "Centre" to display each slide centred on the screen.

Play sound files

These buttons provide various options for synchronising sounds with images. When the screen saver starts, it scans the slide directory and builds separate lists of image and sound files which are then either shuffled into random order or sorted alphabetically depending on the chosen play order. If you want to associate a particular sound track with each slide you could, for example, name your slide images "sldxx.jpg" and the corresponding sounds "sndxx.wav", then choose alphabetic play order so they would be associated with one another. If you check "Synchronised with slides", the sound corresponding to each slide will then start playing when the slide appears on the screen. If a sound plays longer than the specified interval between slide changes, the change will be delayed until the sound for the current slide completes. The default option, "Continuous", decouples sounds from image changes. In this mode the screen saver plays sound files like a compact disc player in "shuffle play" mode, with a pause of the specified number of seconds between tracks so sounds don't run together. If you'd like to decide yourself when a sound is played, check "When Enter key pressed" and press the Enter/Return key to start the next sound file. The Enter key is ignored if a sound is already playing. You can halt a playing sound in any mode by pressing the Esc key. Finally, if you have sound files in your slide directory, but you don't want to play them at the moment, check "Never" and the sound files will be ignored. If you have sound files in your directory, "Never" is not checked, but they don't seem to play, the culprit may be notorious volume control which, on some sound cards, likes to default to no sound at all. Click on the little volume control icon: (it's usually hiding at the right of the tool bar on the bottom of your screen) and crank up the Master, Wave Audio, and MIDI volume controls to something reasonable. The appearance of the icon and the nomenclature in the volume control box may differ depending on which sound card you're using.

Show date and time

If checked, the date and time is displayed in discreet dark blue type above the slide image. If the image is too tall to fit on the screen along with the date and time, it is automatically scaled to fit.

Show file name

If checked, the names of the current image and sound file (if any) names are shown on a line above the slide. If a sound file is playing, its name follows that of image, separated by a plus sign, "+". If "Show date and time" is also checked, the file name(s) follow the date and time, enclosed in parentheses.

Show file type

If "Show file name" is checked and this box is also checked, the file type (or extension) such as .bmp will be included in the file name display. If you prefer to see just the file name, uncheck this box to hide the file type.

Always use 256 colour palette

Slide images come in a variety of formats, ranging from pure black and white bitmaps, grey scale, colour images with palettes of various sizes, and full colour images in which every pixel can have a different colour. If your computer's graphics hardware is limited to 256 colours, full colour images are displayed by performing colour quantisation to reduce the number of distinct colours in the image to 256, chosen to preserve, as closely as possible, the appearance of the original image. If your computer is equipped with "high colour" (15 or 16 bits per pixel: 32768 or 65536 colours) or "true colour" (24 bits or more per pixel) hardware, true colour images can be sent directly to the screen without the quantisation step. If this box is checked, full colour images are quantised even if the hardware is capable of displaying them directly. The principal reason for this option is to permit testing the quantisation algorithm on computers equipped with full colour hardware, but there's another reason you might want to use it. "High colour" (15 or 16 bit) displays really don't have enough resolution (only 5 or 6 bits) per colour to render smooth changes in shade over large areas of an image such as, for example, backgrounds in portrait photography or the change in shade in the sky above the horizon. Such images, viewed on high colour displays, may exhibit unattractive and distracting "banding" effects due to the limited colour resolution of the display, and frequently actually look better when reduced to 256 colours. So, if you have a high colour display and are bothered by band artifacts, you might give this a try. Warning! Colour quantisation is a relatively time-consuming process: it can take several seconds to quantise the colours in a 1024×768 pixel full colour image on a machine in the 133 MHz Pentium class. If you're installing this screen saver on a server machine (probably a bad idea in any case), or your computer runs CPU-intensive tasks in the background (for example, helping to search for new Mersenne prime numbers), and you've configured the screen saver to change slides quickly, the process of quantisation may consume a substantial fraction of your CPU's capacity. So, unless you don't care how much compute time is devoured by the screen saver, stay away from this mode and, if you have a 256 colour display, use a long interval between slide changes.

Change slides every n seconds

Slides will change at the given interval. If you've requested that sound files be synchronised with slides and, at the scheduled time to change slides the last sound is still playing, the change will be delayed until the sound completes.