CGA Games Screensaver pays homage to the four-color era

You don't hear much about screensavers these days, but over on the Adventure Game Studio forums a user named Arj0n has released one that might be worth a moment of your time, especially if you're a retro game fan.

You don't hear much about screensavers these days, but over on the Adventure Game Studio forums a user named Arj0n has released one that might be worth a moment of your time, especially if you're a retro game fan. It's an homage to the four-color CGA era, containing more than 1000 DOS games and over 1200 CGA screens.

The stand-alone screensaver makes games selectable by genre, and will also optionally display information about each game—developer, publisher, year of release—above or below the screenshot. All screens display at 640x480, and if music is your thing there are 15 chiptune tracks that can play in the background while the images pass by.

It's a silly little thing, but fun, too, especially if you've been around long enough to point at the screen and yell, "Yes! I remember!" when the Temple of Apshai screen pops up. I noticed a couple of them that were out of place—Double Dribble, for instance, shows up in the RPG section—but as Arj0n wrote in a follow-up message, putting together the information for all of the games in this screensaver was a "huge task."

The results of his effort, I think, are very cool. And it may not be done yet: Arj0n released a 1.1 version of the package on Saturday, ensuring proper resizing and bit depth of all sprites, and reducing the size of the project in the process. Grab it here.