What is Pixel City (screensaver)?

A Modernized 3D evolution of "Starry Night" (the most famous Classic Mac 2D screen saver for having come built-in the "After Dark"). PixelCity is freeware, & this download includes its sourcecode (GPLv3). v1.1 was further enhanced by Dave Warker for use with OSX 10.6 or more.

A screen saver that shows a procedurally generated city nightscape. Shamus Young wrote it as a small project ... I [Mikael Eiman] thought it was a nifty thing that looked nice, so ... I gave porting it [to OSX] a try. Turned out it wasn't too complicated, and you have the result here.

It creates an effect like seen in The Movies, living cities at night with motion like being filmed from a helicopter, reminding me of cuts from in "The 13th Floor" (1999) and "SkyLine" (2010).

The ScreenSaver format is often a 'platform' or a delivery vehicle for "graphics demos". A work of art in the techy sense is evident when you might ask yourself How is he doing this? With five or ten MegaBytes? and then when you see the actual filesize it's tiny, Pixel City v1.1 is around 0.6 MegaBytes for a Universal Binary, meaning a single PowerPC or Intel iteration of it could be almost half that down to 0.4 MB.

And PixelCity is a real ripe functional CRT screensaver, in which a mostly dark view is touched all over by relatively slow moving dim objects. Its .saver "Options..." panel in System Preferences contains "Performance enhancers" and "Performance degraders" controls which allow it to run well suited for any system like from early G4s on up to modern hardware.

Download Pixel City (screensaver) for Mac

Architecture

OSX Universal Binary

System Requirements

From Mac OS 10.5

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU