Afterglow Help

System requirements

Operating system: macOS 15 Sequoia or later
Mac hardware: Apple silicon or Intel

Importing After Dark modules

Afterglow can import modules from files that you provide or from the in-app Internet Archive browser.

To install modules from local files, you can drag and drop a variety of file formats into the Afterglow window.

Archives	ZIP (.zip) StuffIt classic/5/X (.sit, content-detected .sitx, renamed or extensionless) StuffIt self-extractors (.sea or bare installers) Compact Pro (.cpt or content-detected AutoExtractor) BinHex 4.0 (.hqx, renamed, or extensionless)
Disk images	.iso, .img, .image, .dsk, .cdr, .toast, .bin
Directories	Folders, recursively including supported nested containers
Segmented installers	Multi-floppy StuffIt segments, when all parts are imported together

From these files, Afterglow will import:

After Dark modules
Shared After Dark libraries required for After Dark 3.0 and later
Starry Nights modules embedded in After Dark control panels
MultiModule files
PICT files
Module-specific formats: PICS, Fish!, Ray 3-D shapes

When handling bare module files, take care to preserve their resource forks. macOS should preserve these automatically, but you may run into problems if you pass files through another system that does not.

Beginning with After Dark 3.0, many modules stopped being completely standalone and began relying on shared code, sound, art, and data files. Use the original installer, archive, disk image, or the built-in collection catalog whenever possible. Afterglow recognizes the required companions and places them in its shared Dependencies library automatically.

Compatible After Dark modules

Afterglow is compatible with many After Dark modules written for Macintosh Motorola 68k systems. Macintosh PPC-only and Windows modules are unsupported.

After Dark modules from these software releases are known to be compatible:

Core releases

After Dark 1.0
After Dark 2.0
More After Dark
Art of Darkness
After Dark 3.0
After Dark 4.0
After Dark 4.5J

Expansion releases

Disney
The Simpsons
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
X-Men
Totally Twisted
Looney Tunes
Myst Screen Saver
Tamagotchi
Sailor Moon Collection
Evangelion Screen Saver Vol. 1

User-created third-party modules. Early After Dark software releases included a software developer kit, leading to a huge number of user-created modules—some of which were later purchased by Berkeley Systems and incorporated into the official releases! While many of these work fine in Afterglow, many more are untested and may not work correctly or run at all.

Known Issues

macOS screen saver options button stops working

On macOS Tahoe, the “Options…” button in System Settings may fail to open. Unfortunately, this seems to be a macOS issue affecting multiple screen saver projects, with no solution. As a workaround, quitting and relaunching System Settings temporarily restores functionality.

Slow frame rate for some modules running as macOS screen savers on multi-display systems

The current version of Afterglow cannot render multiple screen savers in parallel, so rendering-intensive modules such as Satori may perform poorly as macOS screen savers on multi-display systems.

How to remove Afterglow

Quit Afterglow, then remove each of the following items in Finder:

Move Afterglow.app from your Applications folder to the Trash.
Choose Go → Go to Folder…, enter ~/Library/Screen Savers, and move Afterglow.saver to the Trash.
Choose Go → Go to Folder… again, enter ~/Library/Application Support, and move the Afterglow folder to the Trash. This also removes your imported modules and other Afterglow data.