Johnny Castaway

This site is dedicated to the enjoyment of the Screen Antics Johnny Castaway screensaver. See the Download Johnny for Free section, lower down the page for details of how to get a free copy . Johnny is marooned on a very small desert island with one coconut palm, and he occupies his time with various activities: Fishing Lighting a fire and cooking food Eating coconuts Diving, swimming and washing Jogging Building a sand castle Looking through his telescope Building a raft Reading a book Sleeping Throwing a bottle into the sea with an SOS message in it Meeting a Mermaid And other activities Johnny's island gets special adornments at various times of the year — New Year's Day, Christmas, etc. Click on the links to see what unusual activities we've found in these areas. If you see any activities not shown here, e-mail me, Dave Brown , and I'll add them to the site. Even if you only see the activities already mentioned, e-mail me anyway, I'm always pleased to hear from fellow Johnny Castaway enthusiasts! There are a few bugs in the program which may appear - check out the Bugs page to see the ones we know about. The Johnny Castaway screen saver was originally published by Sierra On-Line , Inc in 1993, and they later transferred the rights to screensavers.com . However, Johnny no longer seems to be available from their site, but there are lots of places where you can download him. To get links to some of them, click here , or on the Download Johnny icon on the left hand side of the page. If you want some help and advice on downloading and/or installing the screen saver, please look at my Download Help Page . Johnny seems to run under all versions of Windows from 3.1 to 2000 (but check the Bugs Page for possible problems). Daniel Lee Howe told me in April 2001 that Johnny runs happily under Windows ME and 2000 (although you may have to change the pointer to the data files in the .ini file for Windows 2000), and Frank Williams confirmed in August 2001 that Johnny feels right at home running under Windows ME. Jaap van Wingerden has managed to modify Johnny's enviroment so that, among other things, he should run under Windows XP without any problems. More details here. Jacob Cordingley has come up with a Fast Fix for XP. Details here. Although Johnny will run under Windows NT and Windows 2000, the self-extracting zipped file, johncast.exe, that you download from most places, probably won't self-extract - you'll have to use an unzipper to do it. Similarly Linux users can use the Wine package ( ). Run Johnny by typing from the command line: wine ~/.wine/drive c/windows/SCRANTIC.SCR or wine ~/.wine/drive c/windows/SCRANTIC.SCR /S" (to skip the settings checkbox). If you want some help and advice on downloading and/or installing the screen saver, please click here . If you are having problems running Johnny, or you have any questions, check out our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). I'm often asked whether there will ever be a new version of Johnny Castaway - I'm afraid the answer is probably no. Sierra, the original publishers, have given up the rights, and it's unlikely any other software company will pick them up. It's possible that screensavers.com might develop Johnny, but I think that's unlikely. However, an Australian software company called Anasoft Consulting, have come up with a very nice screensaver which, like Johnny, throws up random scenes for your enjoyment. Their’s is, however, truly a screensaver for the 21st century, featuring impressive 3D graphics, and it runs under Windows XP with no problems. The main character is a skeleton called Sly Slim - he’s using a metal detector in the picture on the right. You need a fairly modern computer running Widows 2000 or XP to follow his adventures, but if your setup is less than three years old, you should be fine - anyway, there’s a free demo that you can download to make sure your computer is suitable. To get more details, look at some screenshots, and generally find