Wow! That's a pleasant surprise! My friend sent me a link to this video. Yes, I wrote it. That was one of my first screensavers. I believe this one was based on 3D Graphics Library called Blue Impulse (obviously named after the Japanese Aerobatic Team) that I developed for my master's research project. I should still have source code somewhere in my backup. And, some of the airplane models in this screensaver are in YSFLIGHT, too. Thank you for the video. I showed it during my class today :-) If you have questions about this program, I'm happy to answer.
Would it be simple enough to have its running speed locked vs using the speed of the cpu? I guess if nothing else, what cpu did you program it for? Beautiful work.
There’s quite an array of planes in this, I saw the F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18, F-111, F-117, Saab drakken, Mig-21, Su-27, mirage 2000, Mitsubishi F-2, and probably many more that I missed, there was certainly a lot of effort put into this.
I saw a Harrier at least once, and a MiG 23 (or possibly 27) a couple time. There also seem to be two different F-18s, one with Blue Angels livery, so maybe there's a Hornet and a Super Hornet
That's really cool! Reminds me of old SEGA model 1 games. Lockheed Martin actually partnered with SEGA right when they stopped being Martin Marietta to develop their bleeding edge model 2 CG board for arcades. It was the board that one of the most popular arcade games of all time, Daytona USA ran on. The board was an upgrade to SEGA's previous CG board (later retitled to model 1) which could only do flat-shaded polygons. Martin Marietta brought texture mapping technology at high speed to SEGA. Interestingly, all the textures used with that board are grayscale. The color of the polygon faces overlay ontop of the grayscale texture to give it color, kinda like using 'multiply' layer effects in Photoshop etc. They could assign color values to every single polygon face so they could generate slight (albeit square-looking) variances in color over a large surface that used a single repeating texture, such as grass or rock for example. If you ever see a texture with what looks like more than one color (eg red & green etc) they are actually using 2 textures overlaid on top of each other using an alpha channel to mask out areas and make the 2 textures combine into one seamlessly. It's easy to spot if you ever look at a Model 2 game once you know this!
ZONE f-ing SAMA watches LRG... My life is now complete. You guys got me into some strange stuff as young as 11 (thx to unsupervised internet access, no fault of Zone). But, I also discovered one of my favorite cartoons of all time from one of your parody animations... My Life As A Teenage Robot...
The compiler timestamp is Friday May 09 06:52:57 1997 (UTC). It was written in Microsoft Visual C++. Lots of interesting strings within, including what looks like X,Y,Z coordinates for the 3D model animation, but no other identifiers, copyrights, etc. that I can see. The PDB file for the project references a path C:\usr\ys11\src\flyby2sl\flyby2_s.pdb. Not sure if "ys11" means anything that could help with identification. Super cool though!
I sometimes forget to space the colon marks, so RUclips doesn't treat the unrelated number as a video timestamp and turn it into a link. Similar issue when I'm on Facebook and I talk about money-if I don't keep the dollar sign separate from the numbers, Facebook will think I'm trying to send money user-to-user.
As no one said it yet, ys is likely Soji Yamakawa (CaptainYS), and is the author of YSFlight, there's a pinned comment detailing how this was made for anyone looking for more information but figured I'd let you know. :)
Dude, I think you found my PC!!! No, seriously-- I started my career at Lockheed in Fort Worth back in the late 90s and I totally had that screensaver. I brought it from home. You could never get away with something like that in today’s locked-down IT world, but back then it was the wild west and you could do just about anything on your work PC. We even had a guy set up a Quake server on the company network. We would play at lunchtime. It lasted a few months before the IT folks got wind of it, LOL. I guess that was a bridge too far, heh. Anyhow, thanks for the memories!
I like how the video wasn't up for half hour people are already starting to tear into the screen saver in a hex editor and stuff, it's really freaking cool to see people go through files and such to figure stuff out and it was really fascinating to read some of the findings. The internet truly is a great place after all I guess.
I was thinking... only on LGR Blerbs. There are lots of "vintage PC" channels now, but most would take at least months, before getting enough attention for solid results. LGR is like "This Old House" of vintage computers... although I go elsewhere for soldering technique or even DOS hacking, and I really hated tweaking cards and motherbd jumpers in the 90s.
Thank you for archiving and showcasing this screensaver, and thank you for visiting us at CR! It was a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you also for your incredible patience when I got way too passionate about programming, haha.
Andy, man, it was my pleasure! Had a great time there and you showed me some great stuff I never would've seen otherwise. How cool is it that the original developer of this screensaver got in touch after seeing this video! Check the pinned comment if you haven't seen it :)
What a great glimpse into the golden era of PC's. Little gems like this were everywhere, and brought people simple joy. While computers have become much more powerful, a lot of the love and enthusiasm of prior generations has been lost. This I think is why retro nostalgia is so prevalent now. We miss the excitement and newness that was commonplace then.
It reminds me of a Screensaver with Santa Claus and His Reindeer flying over a town distributing presents. I found a later version with far more realistic graphics (possibly by the same author) but it didn't have the charm of the original. Re you second point I still remember the excitement of trying a demo disc on my newly purchased Atari ST and seeing a fairly realistic animated bird fly across the screen, and then a few years later being completely blown away by the graphics on the N64 (which were of course of SGI quality using technology that would have cost $10000+ just a few years earlier).
This is a service to humanity. I LOVE seeing this extremely obscure/rare software kept alive. It takes nothing for something like this to disappear from both existence and human memory.
Really reminds me of an old indie flight sim called YSFLIGHT. Specially the models and the way the smoke renders. It was made by a Japanese dev and the fact that this makes reference to a Japanese demo team and has a lot of Japanese jets makes me very curious.
@@matthewrease2376 I play a lot of ysflight it’s aged really well and has a great community that makes countless addons it’s a very fun community oriented simulator that doesn’t need to follow the trend of most flight simulators that make the graphics look insane
very interesting! I love this old stuff like this. i used to find stuff like this when i worked at a e-recycler. going threw old systems and hdd was always fun. i found B1-B flight manuals once. fligh controls, radar systems. bomb guidance. the whole worx
@@nukeum9535 and I can think of very good reasons not to. If working directly for Rockwell or the USAF the e-recycler would have been in big trouble if someone had leaked those.
The F-16 is a Thunderbird. I'm going to show it to my dad when he wakes up. He works at the airbase here in Columbus. He works as a contractor for Lockheed back in the early 90s on radar and now does Sim repair for the T1 trainer
@@Phenom98 unfortunately there's nothing really exciting to report. He did remember having it himself but, there wasn't anything historical he could tell me since he's not the author
You are absolutely right. On Ysflight screensaver download page there's the following text: "10/11/2006 This version takes advantage of the upgrade of the YSFLIGHT kernel, and can draw ground textures" This means older screensavers couldn't, and that's exactly what we see in the video.
I would love to watch that screen saver when i was a kid in the 90s. Remember that windows 98 maze thing that i always though it would reach the end at some point
It's just fascinating to see code that someone wrote so long ago in action. Even though it's not remotely in the same class, it reminds me of something that Alex Kosmala, one of the programmers involved with writing the Apollo program guidance computer software, said (in the documentary Moon Machines Part 3 - Guidance Computer): "I spent a good chunk of my life working hard to produce guidance software that enabled that to happen and that they left behind. So, sitting on the Moon is code I wrote and that's always been my proud boast. Something I did is sitting on the Moon right now. That is a neat thought." They used physical "rope memory" to write the programs which is very durable and will be sitting within the lower stages of lunar landers that were left behind for _quite_ some time to come. It just reminds me how important digital preservation is and that's what I think about when I see these wireframe jets streak around on a screen. 😎 (Btw, you can find all six parts of that documentary on RUclips. It's also available in DVD form. Great stuff. Especially the computer part, of course. Also, great music choice for this video! It reminds me of Com Truise! 😎)
This screensaver reminds me of the computer generated graphics in The Last Starfighter. This takes me back to the programs I had on my Windows 95 PC back in the day.
closing music is 11/10! Thank you for sharing this awesome screensaver with the world after all these years. Incredibly how it so quickly found it's creator, too! The internet is an astounding place.
Oh the poop you'd be in for sending a machine out for service or resale in working order nowadays. _3.7.3 Ensure equipment removed for off-site maintenance is sanitized of any CUI._ _3.8.3 Sanitize or destroy system media containing CUI before disposal or release for reuse._
I lived in Fort Worth, TX for my entire childhood until moving to the UK in my teenage years. Lockheed has one of their major complexes there that was essentially integrated with Carswell AB (now NAS FORT WORTH JRB). I remember coming home from school to see the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds from my backyard, it wasn't unusual to spend a Saturday watching an entire aerobatic portion of an airshow perched on my porch steps. If I were to guess, I'd say that PC from Computer Reset was likely from that same Lockheed complex - probably purchased by CR as government/industrial wholesale, after an upgrade push, for refurbishment and resale. Man, I haven't thought about those days in decades. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, LGR.
I worked at the FW Lockheed facility, and judging by the gritty PC exterior and software found on it, I would concur that it was likely from a station on the assembly line. Nice find!
I worked at the Fort Worth Lockheed location back when it belonged to General Dynamics. I should mention that there is another Lockheed Martin facility in the DFW metroplex that the computer could possibly have come from. Their Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) division is located in Grand Prairie.
I lived a couple blocks from that plant, and that's what came to my mind immediately too. I doubt the screensaver was produced by Lockheed, because most of the planes in it were not Lockheed products (other than the F-16, which is built in Fort Worth, and the F-117) but it's not at all unlikely that the computer came from the Fort Worth plant.
Because this screensaver features many different planes all flying solo, I did a little mini-dive into the world of aerobatics. It seem to feature several different aircraft in the colors of the Blue Impulse team, I figured that this might have been some promotional product for an airshow held in Japan. The FAI World Grand Prix had the Nippon Japanese Grand Prix events take place in both 1996 and in 1998. I can't seem to find any pictures or listings of aircraft that flew, but it isn't to far fetched to assume that the Blue Impulse would be heavily featured in a Japanese event. Might be worth to look into.
I've got a modified version I'd be happy to send your way somehow, even though receiving files from strangers over the internet is always a great idea.
awesome i love seeing old programs and creations brought into the modern age and showing off just how much control someone had over their pcs back in the olden days
I love old 3D effects. I'm reminded of Star Fox, a sci-fi game with actors, and a few other PC games from around the 80's or early 90's I"m glad you were able to find the source for this.
Man I really do miss this era of computing. It truly was the golden age. Newer devices are 1000x faster and more powerful, but there is no love or passion compared to what they were. It was such a great period to be alive. I remember PC's with no fans and tiny heatsinks, Cyrix CPU's, AMD and Intel using the same sockets, SIMM RAM, teensy but loud HDD's with charming clicking noises when POSTing, ball mice, endless floppies with sharpie labels. 5 1/4 CD readers with headphone sockets and playback controls, the satisfaction of pressing Degauss on a CRT and watching the image immediately sharpen and colour correct. Hell, even the smell of older 90's PC's was different - Probably due to the dipping process of the motherboards.
This just reminded me of my favorite screensaver as a kidthat I can't find anymore. It was a never-ending space battle with a giant ship in the background with lots of little ships fighting. For me as a kid, it was like watching a movie. But I have no idea what it was called or where to find it. Hope someday I can find it again.
This is awesome! I love the aesthetics, they hit that sweet spot where the visuals are kind of retro-technical-utilitarian, but still visually appealing: the plane models are nice, easily recognisable, the visual effects add just the right amount of flare while still being simple enough to not clash with the rest of the visuals. It's very pleasant to look at and it feels like advanced tech, even if it's old advanced tech. I haven't ran an actual screensaver in ages, but I would legit use this, at least for a while. Also, Clint, great choice of music! Edit: I see in the description that there is a modernized version, downloading it as soon as I get home!
It's good that Computer Reset is still around, and they've got volunteers going through all the late guy's stuff there. I'd be truly heartbroken to see all that retro tech just being sent off for scrap.
I've used the wayback machine to read older versions of the YSFlight site - and back in 1999 at university? the YSFlight developer wrote the "Blue Impulse" SDK for writing flight sims and also an API for creating screensavers that was setup to use his Flight API - so by the looks of it? somebody at lockheed had purchased/aquired an earlier version of his API - question is did they build a demo/example, did it come with this example - or did Lockheed use his API to make this screensaver?
Andy showed me this screensaver when testing the PC Jr monitor I tested. You are absolutely correct that Andy's an interesting dude, cool in a quirky way, and this screensaver is AWESOME!
In the late 1970’s I got a chance to play with a minicomputer hooked to an Evans and Sutherland CRT of immense size (36”?). It was being used for industrial design, however it’s operator showed me it’s screen saver/demo animation; 4 fighters in formation flying over New Mexico. This is very similar.
Man, I miss screensavers. I had a really neat one of a Star Wars space battle between TIE Fighters and X-Wings with the Millennium Falcon all duking it out.
I have that same Flyby2.scr screen saver on a floppy diskette (assuming it's still readable). I got it when I worked at McDonnell Douglas. I think that's one of the ".scr" files you can rename or copy to a ".exe" and just run it like a normal program. The floppy diskette it's on has the issue where the media descriptor byte is not set. At work we were switching from Win 95 to Win 2000, a co-worker couldn't read a floppy on his PC running Windows 2000, but my same machine running Windows 95 read it fine. The Win 9x versions didn't care about that byte, but Win2k onward do. So the easiest thing is to fire up a Win 95 (or 98?) machine to try reading it. I hope so, because the floppy is supposed to also have some F-18 animated cursors; when the PC is busy the F-18 does a barrel roll if I recall.
This takes me back to the late 1990s. I was in the military and a bunch of us were buying computers for the first time and loved to add screensavers, notification noises, and themes. All this needs to have is the "ut oh" notification from ICQ to pop up. Ugh, I feel so old.
This is great. Had our first PC in ‘96 and one thing I loved was the intricacy of screensavers. Those expanding pipes were a time sink. This would have been amazing.
My old man used to get their old PCs and hard drives from someone who worked there. Being it was back in the 386 and windows 3.1 days they weren’t wiping them and it was pretty cool to see what was on them, both the neat personal things from the engineers, and probably stuff you shouldn’t have like technical details and other design documents for their military hardware. Still they were a blast to look thru.
Screensavers used to be a really cool and important part of computing. Not only were the included screensavers in Windows super cool but you could frequently find awesome custom ones floating around like this. It's one of the things I really miss from those days.
set playback speed to 0.75, that feels even more appropriate for this screensaver. This is a really cool screensaver that I really wish I knew about back in the day. Also, Clint, just a suggestion, but you should turn the description update into a pinned comment. That's some really cool info that most people are going to miss out on. Also, Also, Everyone who wants the screen saver, it's been posted in the description complete with an updated hi-res (4k) version that will run on modern Windows based systems without out going crazy fast.
Thanks for the cool screensaver Clint. I'm going to put it on my Pentium MMX Micron computer. It's going to be right next to my Daniel Jackson SG1 screensaver.
I remember going through a mild obsession in middle school with 3d accelerated screen savers when I finally got a voodoo card. It would be nostalgic and interesting to see a video of that era of proliferation of hardware accelerated novelty. Hell, maybe a series on the history of implementation of different features, from texture filtering to water simulation to anti aliasing, stuff before all the modern shaders and ambient occlusion or subsurface scattering which came after the era when 64mb of VRAM was god tier for a home PC.
Very cool, thanks for sharing it Clint. Looks like a screensaver my grandpa would have on his machine back in the day I'm throwing this on my Win98 system!
So cool. Wondering how much cooler it was for an aircraft engineer around the millennium who found this niche japanese screensaver. I bet they felt cool af having it on their work computer.
Love the Computer Reset videos. An idea: The owner of Computer Reset needs to start a youtube channel and have guest youtubers like yourself and the 8-bit guy on location. Could be great!
I think I've found it on the Internet Archive and it's called TAZ screensaver (1997) but RUclips keeps deleting my reply with anything that even suspects its a link. Cheers.
Looks to me like this screensaver showcases a few international display teams, the F16 has the markings of the USAF Thunderbirds display team, the F18 is in Blue Angels livery, and the T2 is in Blue Impulse markings
One big thing about Lockheed Martin - they have a *HUGE* presence in "outsourced IT". They almost certainly have more employees in IT in non-airplane, non-government roles than they do in what people actually think of "Lockheed Martin" about. Odds are this is a random non-aviation-related LM employee's workstation.
Red Arrows are awesome, my uncle was in the RAF so me and my grandfather used to visit the air bases and one year he got us access to an airshow where the arrows were performing. Nice memories.
I had that too, I belive it came with YS flight simulator from the earlier versions, that simulator appears to be still developed today, you might ask someone from the forum
Yeah, it's right in that time period of filled-polygon aircraft simulator games. I was big into Fighter's Anthology which came out in 1998. Has the same sort of look and feel but with a textured sky and ground. Fun times.
Commercial flight sims were looking pretty good by then - Microsoft combat flight simulator came out in 1998. For open source projects it'd be about right though.
Wow! That's a pleasant surprise! My friend sent me a link to this video. Yes, I wrote it. That was one of my first screensavers. I believe this one was based on 3D Graphics Library called Blue Impulse (obviously named after the Japanese Aerobatic Team) that I developed for my master's research project. I should still have source code somewhere in my backup. And, some of the airplane models in this screensaver are in YSFLIGHT, too. Thank you for the video. I showed it during my class today :-) If you have questions about this program, I'm happy to answer.
We need to upvote this comment!
Awesome!! This post needs to be stickied at the top or something
Wow supper cool hopefully it can be updated.
Very cool, Soji. Must be neat to see your old work still around on the internets!
Would it be simple enough to have its running speed locked vs using the speed of the cpu? I guess if nothing else, what cpu did you program it for?
Beautiful work.
There’s quite an array of planes in this, I saw the F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18, F-111, F-117, Saab drakken, Mig-21, Su-27, mirage 2000, Mitsubishi F-2, and probably many more that I missed, there was certainly a lot of effort put into this.
i loved that they had the A-6 and even the EA-6B in there as well! also spotted a Mig-23 in there. and a Harrier
@@JK-dv3qe Heck yeah, that's pretty cool how they modeled the difference between an A-6 and an EA-6B.
I think it was a Saab 37 Viggen, maybe
@@Skracken Viggen for sure! 🤙
I saw a Harrier at least once, and a MiG 23 (or possibly 27) a couple time.
There also seem to be two different F-18s, one with Blue Angels livery, so maybe there's a Hornet and a Super Hornet
That's really cool! Reminds me of old SEGA model 1 games. Lockheed Martin actually partnered with SEGA right when they stopped being Martin Marietta to develop their bleeding edge model 2 CG board for arcades. It was the board that one of the most popular arcade games of all time, Daytona USA ran on. The board was an upgrade to SEGA's previous CG board (later retitled to model 1) which could only do flat-shaded polygons. Martin Marietta brought texture mapping technology at high speed to SEGA. Interestingly, all the textures used with that board are grayscale. The color of the polygon faces overlay ontop of the grayscale texture to give it color, kinda like using 'multiply' layer effects in Photoshop etc. They could assign color values to every single polygon face so they could generate slight (albeit square-looking) variances in color over a large surface that used a single repeating texture, such as grass or rock for example. If you ever see a texture with what looks like more than one color (eg red & green etc) they are actually using 2 textures overlaid on top of each other using an alpha channel to mask out areas and make the 2 textures combine into one seamlessly. It's easy to spot if you ever look at a Model 2 game once you know this!
ZOOOONE! All of a sudden I had a vision of an airforce-inspired pinup of Zone-tan in mechanics garb working on a jet!
never knew you're watching this channel
ZONE f-ing SAMA watches LRG... My life is now complete. You guys got me into some strange stuff as young as 11 (thx to unsupervised internet access, no fault of Zone). But, I also discovered one of my favorite cartoons of all time from one of your parody animations... My Life As A Teenage Robot...
Calm down m8, zones a regular person like all of us.
We got the stop running into each other like this.
The compiler timestamp is Friday May 09 06:52:57 1997 (UTC). It was written in Microsoft Visual C++. Lots of interesting strings within, including what looks like X,Y,Z coordinates for the 3D model animation, but no other identifiers, copyrights, etc. that I can see. The PDB file for the project references a path C:\usr\ys11\src\flyby2sl\flyby2_s.pdb. Not sure if "ys11" means anything that could help with identification. Super cool though!
OMG this is YSFLIGHT isn't it?
@@claudiodiaz9752 YES IT IS I LOVE YSFLIGHT
I sometimes forget to space the colon marks, so RUclips doesn't treat the unrelated number as a video timestamp and turn it into a link. Similar issue when I'm on Facebook and I talk about money-if I don't keep the dollar sign separate from the numbers, Facebook will think I'm trying to send money user-to-user.
As no one said it yet, ys is likely Soji Yamakawa (CaptainYS), and is the author of YSFlight, there's a pinned comment detailing how this was made for anyone looking for more information but figured I'd let you know. :)
@@claudiodiaz9752 idk what YSflight is but looking it up it reminds me of FlightGear, another f2p very moddable flight sim
Dude, I think you found my PC!!! No, seriously-- I started my career at Lockheed in Fort Worth back in the late 90s and I totally had that screensaver. I brought it from home. You could never get away with something like that in today’s locked-down IT world, but back then it was the wild west and you could do just about anything on your work PC. We even had a guy set up a Quake server on the company network. We would play at lunchtime. It lasted a few months before the IT folks got wind of it, LOL. I guess that was a bridge too far, heh.
Anyhow, thanks for the memories!
I like how the video wasn't up for half hour people are already starting to tear into the screen saver in a hex editor and stuff, it's really freaking cool to see people go through files and such to figure stuff out and it was really fascinating to read some of the findings. The internet truly is a great place after all I guess.
Yes! I knew this audience wouldn't take long to find out stuff where I had no idea where to look
I was thinking... only on LGR Blerbs. There are lots of "vintage PC" channels now, but most would take at least months, before getting enough attention for solid results. LGR is like "This Old House" of vintage computers... although I go elsewhere for soldering technique or even DOS hacking, and I really hated tweaking cards and motherbd jumpers in the 90s.
And then the dev just happens by, and gives people tips for playing with the source code. Awesome.
@@LGRBlerbs It is the collective will of the machine.
Thank you for archiving and showcasing this screensaver, and thank you for visiting us at CR! It was a real pleasure to meet you. Thank you also for your incredible patience when I got way too passionate about programming, haha.
Andy, man, it was my pleasure! Had a great time there and you showed me some great stuff I never would've seen otherwise.
How cool is it that the original developer of this screensaver got in touch after seeing this video! Check the pinned comment if you haven't seen it :)
Amazing indeed! You really made his day and so many people are excited to dig in! Thank you for using your platform to share this gem with the world.
What a great glimpse into the golden era of PC's. Little gems like this were everywhere, and brought people simple joy. While computers have become much more powerful, a lot of the love and enthusiasm of prior generations has been lost. This I think is why retro nostalgia is so prevalent now. We miss the excitement and newness that was commonplace then.
It reminds me of a Screensaver with Santa Claus and His Reindeer flying over a town distributing presents. I found a later version with far more realistic graphics (possibly by the same author) but it didn't have the charm of the original.
Re you second point I still remember the excitement of trying a demo disc on my newly purchased Atari ST and seeing a fairly realistic animated bird fly across the screen, and then a few years later being completely blown away by the graphics on the N64 (which were of course of SGI quality using technology that would have cost $10000+ just a few years earlier).
This is a service to humanity. I LOVE seeing this extremely obscure/rare software kept alive. It takes nothing for something like this to disappear from both existence and human memory.
Really reminds me of an old indie flight sim called YSFLIGHT. Specially the models and the way the smoke renders. It was made by a Japanese dev and the fact that this makes reference to a Japanese demo team and has a lot of Japanese jets makes me very curious.
It is ysflight I’m sure
Yeah, a lot of other people talking about ysflight. Must be it.
@@matthewrease2376 I play a lot of ysflight it’s aged really well and has a great community that makes countless addons it’s a very fun community oriented simulator that doesn’t need to follow the trend of most flight simulators that make the graphics look insane
@@BonesAv I was a very active member of Yspilots forum.
@@claudiodiaz9752 Ah I’m a member of YSFHQ forum
Reflections on the aircraft seem ahead of the time for the 90s.
4 mins of chill electronic music vibes with wireframe flybys? Hell yeah dude
very interesting! I love this old stuff like this. i used to find stuff like this when i worked at a e-recycler. going threw old systems and hdd was always fun. i found B1-B flight manuals once. fligh controls, radar systems. bomb guidance. the whole worx
Name fits
Did you archive them 👀
@@DraxTrac no i didnt see any reason to.
@@nukeum9535 and I can think of very good reasons not to. If working directly for Rockwell or the USAF the e-recycler would have been in big trouble if someone had leaked those.
The F-16 is a Thunderbird. I'm going to show it to my dad when he wakes up. He works at the airbase here in Columbus. He works as a contractor for Lockheed back in the early 90s on radar and now does Sim repair for the T1 trainer
Tell us how it went!
@@Phenom98 unfortunately there's nothing really exciting to report. He did remember having it himself but, there wasn't anything historical he could tell me since he's not the author
The direct capture was an indescribably beautiful vibe.
Anything that takes me back to when we were kids is fun! The music was spot on. Thanks Clint!
Oh, that's truly ancient version of Ysflight screensaver. Nice.
You are absolutely right. On Ysflight screensaver download page there's the following text:
"10/11/2006
This version takes advantage of the upgrade of the YSFLIGHT kernel, and can draw ground textures"
This means older screensavers couldn't, and that's exactly what we see in the video.
My girlfriends dad is retired Air Force pilot, top brass, officer here in Colorado Springs. I'm gonna show this to him and get back to you
That wallpaper SCREAMS of mid-90's computing and I love it so much. Makes me want to go rewatch Lawnmower Man right now lol!
I would love to watch that screen saver when i was a kid in the 90s. Remember that windows 98 maze thing that i always though it would reach the end at some point
It's just fascinating to see code that someone wrote so long ago in action. Even though it's not remotely in the same class, it reminds me of something that Alex Kosmala, one of the programmers involved with writing the Apollo program guidance computer software, said (in the documentary Moon Machines Part 3 - Guidance Computer):
"I spent a good chunk of my life working hard to produce guidance software that enabled that to happen and that they left behind. So, sitting on the Moon is code I wrote and that's always been my proud boast. Something I did is sitting on the Moon right now. That is a neat thought."
They used physical "rope memory" to write the programs which is very durable and will be sitting within the lower stages of lunar landers that were left behind for _quite_ some time to come. It just reminds me how important digital preservation is and that's what I think about when I see these wireframe jets streak around on a screen. 😎
(Btw, you can find all six parts of that documentary on RUclips. It's also available in DVD form. Great stuff. Especially the computer part, of course. Also, great music choice for this video! It reminds me of Com Truise! 😎)
I love stories like this, especially when the creator is found!
This screensaver reminds me of the computer generated graphics in The Last Starfighter. This takes me back to the programs I had on my Windows 95 PC back in the day.
closing music is 11/10! Thank you for sharing this awesome screensaver with the world after all these years. Incredibly how it so quickly found it's creator, too! The internet is an astounding place.
Blue Impulse is the 3D graphics SDK by the developer of YSFlight. I'm guessing this screensaver is a demo of the simulator or the graphics library. :)
All the screensavers were a part of YSFlight at a certain point.
Dude. This is pure, highly refined and distilled awesome. I love the music video at the end. Thank you for sharing this with us.
Lockheed executive: "You're telling me our top secret military flight modeling software got leaked... HOW?"
Clint: "haha screensaver go brr"
Oh the poop you'd be in for sending a machine out for service or resale in working order nowadays.
_3.7.3 Ensure equipment removed for off-site maintenance is sanitized of any CUI._
_3.8.3 Sanitize or destroy system media containing CUI before disposal or release for reuse._
I lived in Fort Worth, TX for my entire childhood until moving to the UK in my teenage years. Lockheed has one of their major complexes there that was essentially integrated with Carswell AB (now NAS FORT WORTH JRB). I remember coming home from school to see the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds from my backyard, it wasn't unusual to spend a Saturday watching an entire aerobatic portion of an airshow perched on my porch steps.
If I were to guess, I'd say that PC from Computer Reset was likely from that same Lockheed complex - probably purchased by CR as government/industrial wholesale, after an upgrade push, for refurbishment and resale.
Man, I haven't thought about those days in decades. Thanks for the trip down memory lane, LGR.
Oh wow, that'd certainly make sense. Thanks for sharing the memories!
I worked at the FW Lockheed facility, and judging by the gritty PC exterior and software found on it, I would concur that it was likely from a station on the assembly line. Nice find!
I worked at the Fort Worth Lockheed location back when it belonged to General Dynamics. I should mention that there is another Lockheed Martin facility in the DFW metroplex that the computer could possibly have come from. Their Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) division is located in Grand Prairie.
Used to live in Comox, BC, Canada where Canada's Snowbirds would practice out of. Saw many, many shows just like off our porch.
I lived a couple blocks from that plant, and that's what came to my mind immediately too. I doubt the screensaver was produced by Lockheed, because most of the planes in it were not Lockheed products (other than the F-16, which is built in Fort Worth, and the F-117) but it's not at all unlikely that the computer came from the Fort Worth plant.
Because this screensaver features many different planes all flying solo, I did a little mini-dive into the world of aerobatics. It seem to feature several different aircraft in the colors of the Blue Impulse team, I figured that this might have been some promotional product for an airshow held in Japan.
The FAI World Grand Prix had the Nippon Japanese Grand Prix events take place in both 1996 and in 1998. I can't seem to find any pictures or listings of aircraft that flew, but it isn't to far fetched to assume that the Blue Impulse would be heavily featured in a Japanese event.
Might be worth to look into.
Hello from Canada! We have a display team too! They're called the Snowbirds
Years ago I photographed their two-day air show at Cold Lake!
Now that’s a cool screensaver! I’m hoping someone can modify it to run on faster systems so I could use it on my Windows 98 PCs.
Same, I'd love to use it on more systems.
EDIT: Speedfix version! archive.org/details/flyby2_202201
Ditto
Would love to be able to use it at full screen and without hypersonic drive being engaged all the time.
I've got a modified version I'd be happy to send your way somehow, even though receiving files from strangers over the internet is always a great idea.
@@avacore I love using sendanywhere myself
I’ve used it in some very unorthodox file moving stuff and it basically always works as intended
awesome i love seeing old programs and creations brought into the modern age and showing off just how much control someone had over their pcs back in the olden days
LOVE THIS. My grand-dad worked for Lockheed and I always enjoyed looking at the C-130s and F-22s in the newsletters he got in the mail
Mine did too! C130 Mechanic!
@@trash_miner Whoa, same! He worked on P-47s in the war and C-130s afterwards
I love old 3D effects. I'm reminded of Star Fox, a sci-fi game with actors, and a few other PC games from around the 80's or early 90's
I"m glad you were able to find the source for this.
I could honestly watch that combination of music and visuals for HOURS !
Man I really do miss this era of computing. It truly was the golden age. Newer devices are 1000x faster and more powerful, but there is no love or passion compared to what they were. It was such a great period to be alive. I remember PC's with no fans and tiny heatsinks, Cyrix CPU's, AMD and Intel using the same sockets, SIMM RAM, teensy but loud HDD's with charming clicking noises when POSTing, ball mice, endless floppies with sharpie labels. 5 1/4 CD readers with headphone sockets and playback controls, the satisfaction of pressing Degauss on a CRT and watching the image immediately sharpen and colour correct. Hell, even the smell of older 90's PC's was different - Probably due to the dipping process of the motherboards.
This just reminded me of my favorite screensaver as a kidthat I can't find anymore. It was a never-ending space battle with a giant ship in the background with lots of little ships fighting. For me as a kid, it was like watching a movie. But I have no idea what it was called or where to find it. Hope someday I can find it again.
This is awesome! I love the aesthetics, they hit that sweet spot where the visuals are kind of retro-technical-utilitarian, but still visually appealing: the plane models are nice, easily recognisable, the visual effects add just the right amount of flare while still being simple enough to not clash with the rest of the visuals. It's very pleasant to look at and it feels like advanced tech, even if it's old advanced tech. I haven't ran an actual screensaver in ages, but I would legit use this, at least for a while.
Also, Clint, great choice of music!
Edit: I see in the description that there is a modernized version, downloading it as soon as I get home!
Clint, I hope you continue to say "blerbish greetings" on every blerb going forward. It made my day.
It's good that Computer Reset is still around, and they've got volunteers going through all the late guy's stuff there. I'd be truly heartbroken to see all that retro tech just being sent off for scrap.
I've used the wayback machine to read older versions of the YSFlight site - and back in 1999 at university? the YSFlight developer wrote the "Blue Impulse" SDK for writing flight sims and also an API for creating screensavers that was setup to use his Flight API - so by the looks of it? somebody at lockheed had purchased/aquired an earlier version of his API - question is did they build a demo/example, did it come with this example - or did Lockheed use his API to make this screensaver?
Probably just for the screensaver, actual simulators would have been too expensive to run on workstations.
Andy showed me this screensaver when testing the PC Jr monitor I tested. You are absolutely correct that Andy's an interesting dude, cool in a quirky way, and this screensaver is AWESOME!
In the late 1970’s I got a chance to play with a minicomputer hooked to an Evans and Sutherland CRT of immense size (36”?). It was being used for industrial design, however it’s operator showed me it’s screen saver/demo animation; 4 fighters in formation flying over New Mexico. This is very similar.
I swear my family had this screensaver when I was young. very surreal having old memories surface like that lol
yo! those are all default aircraft models from YSflight!
There's nothing quite like nicely detailed low poly aircraft
This screensaver is an absolute gem of a find!! So glad it gets to see the light of day!! Already set this up on all my PCs
Andy showed this to me at CR last week. This has got to be the coolest screensaver ever. And it's even more impressive Irl on a real CRT :)
Man, I miss screensavers. I had a really neat one of a Star Wars space battle between TIE Fighters and X-Wings with the Millennium Falcon all duking it out.
this is the kind of archaeology that doesn't a snooze.
Okay, I'm just vibin' out on the ending. Great choice, Clint. What a great way to wind down a stressful couple of days.
Crazy to see a fully 3d screen saver from this era. That was extremely taxing on the computer back then.
I had this on my Computer back in the day until it crashed and burned on me. I been looking for this for YEARS, "Thanks" for sharing this again!
Those things are absolute rarities, cherish them.
I have that same Flyby2.scr screen saver on a floppy diskette (assuming it's still readable). I got it when I worked at McDonnell Douglas. I think that's one of the ".scr" files you can rename or copy to a ".exe" and just run it like a normal program.
The floppy diskette it's on has the issue where the media descriptor byte is not set. At work we were switching from Win 95 to Win 2000, a co-worker couldn't read a floppy on his PC running Windows 2000, but my same machine running Windows 95 read it fine. The Win 9x versions didn't care about that byte, but Win2k onward do. So the easiest thing is to fire up a Win 95 (or 98?) machine to try reading it. I hope so, because the floppy is supposed to also have some F-18 animated cursors; when the PC is busy the F-18 does a barrel roll if I recall.
Congrats, L. You made it on the music playlist! Ambient banger to finish was the cremé!
This takes me back to the late 1990s. I was in the military and a bunch of us were buying computers for the first time and loved to add screensavers, notification noises, and themes. All this needs to have is the "ut oh" notification from ICQ to pop up. Ugh, I feel so old.
This is great. Had our first PC in ‘96 and one thing I loved was the intricacy of screensavers. Those expanding pipes were a time sink. This would have been amazing.
My old man used to get their old PCs and hard drives from someone who worked there. Being it was back in the 386 and windows 3.1 days they weren’t wiping them and it was pretty cool to see what was on them, both the neat personal things from the engineers, and probably stuff you shouldn’t have like technical details and other design documents for their military hardware. Still they were a blast to look thru.
Screensavers used to be a really cool and important part of computing. Not only were the included screensavers in Windows super cool but you could frequently find awesome custom ones floating around like this. It's one of the things I really miss from those days.
set playback speed to 0.75, that feels even more appropriate for this screensaver.
This is a really cool screensaver that I really wish I knew about back in the day. Also, Clint, just a suggestion, but you should turn the description update into a pinned comment. That's some really cool info that most people are going to miss out on. Also, Also, Everyone who wants the screen saver, it's been posted in the description complete with an updated hi-res (4k) version that will run on modern Windows based systems without out going crazy fast.
Oh Man, this images really made me feel happy, i never could imagine so much in 1disc, amazing arquitecture, im speechless
This is the Mach Loop of the screen savers!
Thanks for the cool screensaver Clint. I'm going to put it on my Pentium MMX Micron computer. It's going to be right next to my Daniel Jackson SG1 screensaver.
I remember going through a mild obsession in middle school with 3d accelerated screen savers when I finally got a voodoo card. It would be nostalgic and interesting to see a video of that era of proliferation of hardware accelerated novelty. Hell, maybe a series on the history of implementation of different features, from texture filtering to water simulation to anti aliasing, stuff before all the modern shaders and ambient occlusion or subsurface scattering which came after the era when 64mb of VRAM was god tier for a home PC.
I was stationed at a US Air Force base in Japan during the '80s. The Blue Impulse performed several times while I was there.
One thing to note as well.....You can extract the screensaver file using 7-zip and see some alternate icons! Pretty neat.
Or Resource Hacker would be better to use
Very cool, thanks for sharing it Clint. Looks like a screensaver my grandpa would have on his machine back in the day I'm throwing this on my Win98 system!
Great looking screensaver. My favorite from back in the day was Johnny Castaway. Used to watch that one alot
The capture with music was awesome
I love finding old neat software in vintage machines...
Found a full copy of wolfenstein in a 486 gateway, and a bunch of midi samples in another
whatever it is, looks so cool with the music at the end.
makes me want to go full retrowave
I live in Ishinomaki, home of the Blue Impulse! Installed this screensaver right away!
So cool. Wondering how much cooler it was for an aircraft engineer around the millennium who found this niche japanese screensaver. I bet they felt cool af having it on their work computer.
using this screensaver video in wallpaper engine on my second monitor (its a 4:3 EDTV) and im loving it
great vid as always
Makes me think of a screensaver called Terrain Flight. Although that one was much simpler. But it did generate a nice looking landscape.
I knew it reminded me of something! That may be it. At least the name rings a bell.
wow this is awesome... id never find out about this stuff if you didn't show it to me. thanks Clint!
An hour of this screensaver with some sweet synthwave, please!
Love the Computer Reset videos. An idea: The owner of Computer Reset needs to start a youtube channel and have guest youtubers like yourself and the 8-bit guy on location. Could be great!
cool, that screams 90s. Nice job finding out who made it too!
One screen saver I loved was a Tasmanian devil spinning and eating the desktop icons..Unfortunately I cannot find it anywhere anymore.
I think I've found it on the Internet Archive and it's called TAZ screensaver (1997) but RUclips keeps deleting my reply with anything that even suspects its a link. Cheers.
I'm assuming I won't be the first to ask for a 10 hour version of that direct capture. Fantastic music choice.
Debug Info was stored at C:\usr\ys11\src\flyby2sl\flyby2_s.pdb
There are also some gui dialog boxes which seems to be unused in a screensaver
Growing up on movies like Iron Eagle, this is such a treat :)
Thank you LGR! It's a joy, and a Privilege.
Looks to me like this screensaver showcases a few international display teams,
the F16 has the markings of the USAF Thunderbirds display team, the F18 is in Blue Angels livery, and the T2 is in Blue Impulse markings
wow the models are pretty awesome, i love lowpoly models. hope someone extract the 3d models soon
One big thing about Lockheed Martin - they have a *HUGE* presence in "outsourced IT". They almost certainly have more employees in IT in non-airplane, non-government roles than they do in what people actually think of "Lockheed Martin" about. Odds are this is a random non-aviation-related LM employee's workstation.
I never knew that!
That is a very cool screensaver. Am looking forward to the new Computer Reset video.
loves the screensaver cool. the graphic looks like on the old game big red racing. you all have a nice day.
Thank you for putting the actual file up and Not a floppy image.
These .scr screensavers would work with Windows XP.
Red Arrows are awesome, my uncle was in the RAF so me and my grandfather used to visit the air bases and one year he got us access to an airshow where the arrows were performing. Nice memories.
I had that too, I belive it came with YS flight simulator from the earlier versions, that simulator appears to be still developed today, you might ask someone from the forum
really good choice of music at the end.
reminds of some of the animations played in computer stores windows back then, awesome for being 1980!
Amazing. Thanks for that update. That's fantastic.
Love the Com Truise style beat at the end with the jets flying by 👍
Absolute chad for archiving all the files
Yeah, it's right in that time period of filled-polygon aircraft simulator games. I was big into Fighter's Anthology which came out in 1998. Has the same sort of look and feel but with a textured sky and ground. Fun times.
Commercial flight sims were looking pretty good by then - Microsoft combat flight simulator came out in 1998. For open source projects it'd be about right though.
The F-16 is in Air force Thunderbirds livery and iirc they did a few airshows in Japan alongside Blue Impulse.