Nerdymark Demoscene Screensaver
A native macOS screensaver bundling 52 generative scenes — plasma fields, cellular automata, demoscene effects, fractals, particle systems, agent simulations, optical illusions, and auto-playing classic games. All scenes are pure Swift + Core Graphics.
Universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), Developer ID signed, notarized by Apple. macOS 11 Big Sur or later.
Installing
- Open the downloaded
.dmg - Double-click
NerdymarkScreenSaver.saver - System Settings opens → click Install
- System Settings → Screen Saver → pick Nerdymark Demoscene
- Click Options… to choose a specific scene or set "Random" rotation, and tune each scene's individual parameters
What's in the bundle
52 scenes across these families:
- Plasma family — classic, spiral, diamond, ripple variants
- Demoscene — copper bars, raster bars, sine scroller, glenz vectors, Mode 7 floor, rotozoomer, vector balls, hypercube, tunnel, C64 demo composite
- Cellular & generative — Game of Life, Reaction-Diffusion (Gray-Scott), Voronoi cells, Truchet tiles, Mandelbrot zoom, recursive maze, DLA snowflake
- Particle / agent sims — flocking fish, bug swarm, slime mold (Physarum), vector field flow, falling sand, blizzard, bubbles, lava lamp with bulb glow
- Optical illusions — Scintillating Grid, Simultaneous Contrast, Afterimage
- Throwbacks — Win95-style 3D Pipes, bouncing DVD logo, screensaver Snake (A* pathfinding), Tetris auto-play, search light, lens flare, Rubik's cube
- Auto-playing games — Pong AI vs AI, Tron light cycles
- Eye candy — Synthwave grid, Aurora Borealis, fractal trees, parallax mountains, constellation maker, ripple tank, Celtic braid, flag wave (Pride / Trans / USA / Palestine / Ukraine)
Several scenes (Bouncing Logo, Sine Scroller, C64 Demoscene, Search Light) accept your own custom text via Options.
Performance
CPU-rendered through Core Graphics, no Metal required. Heavier scenes (Mandelbrot, Reaction-Diffusion, Slime Mold) render into low-resolution buffers and bilinear-upscale, keeping the macOS screensaver CPU watchdog happy. On an M1, fan stays off.
Source code
Open source on GitHub: nerdymark/NerdymarkScreensaver. Pure Swift, no third-party dependencies. The README has the full codesign + notarize pipeline if you want to build your own. Adding a new scene is one file plus one line in the registry.
Feedback
Bug reports, scene ideas, or "my fan spun up" reports: reach out or open an issue on the repo.