Afterglow app icon: a glowing meteor crossing a violet star field

afterglow

Run classic After Dark screen savers on your modern Macintosh.

After Dark screen savers of the classic Macintosh era are tiny, sometimes surreal, often funny works of art: flying toasters, psychedelic fractals, animated starfields -- even a playable space shooter. Afterglow brings them to modern macOS, in the spirit of software preservation.

Under the hood, Afterglow runs a custom-built engine powered by the Musashi 68k CPU emulator with no dependency on proprietary ROMs or classic Mac OS emulation.

Modules aren’t included, but importing is easy: drag in modules, disk images, or compressed archives and Afterglow extracts and imports them automatically. Or browse and install releases straight from the Internet Archive without leaving the app.

Download — coming soon Universal binary · macOS 15+

See it in action

Features

macOS screen saver

Playing modules inside the app is well and good, but the fun of screen savers is in the surprise and delight of returning to your computer and seeing something unexpected: a psychedelic fractal, a procedurally generated mountain landscape, a Bad Dog defiling your desktop.

Afterglow makes this possible through a companion screen saver for modern macOS, allowing you to choose from any of the modules you’ve added into Afterglow.

Yes, you can run Flying Toasters again!

Installation sources

Afterglow does not provide After Dark modules, but makes it easy to import them from a wide variety of sources: bare module files, StuffIt archives of module files, disk images of the original installation media, self-extracting installers, and HFS disk images. Whatever you have, if there are modules in there, there’s a good chance you can simply drop it into Afterglow.

Lost your floppies? The built-in Internet Archive browser may help you find your lost media.

Exquisitely faithful

There have been many remakes and ports of After Dark modules over the years, but Afterglow runs the original module code and prioritizes faithful visual, audio, and timing fidelity. Early, CPU bound modules have pacing adjustments to ensure they render at the intended framerates for hardware of the period.

And more...