Table of Contents

• What Is It?
• Why Screen Saver?
• System Requirements
• Installing LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä
• Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä
• Graphic User Interface vs. Dialog User Interface
• How to Customize LaKeyÒ Screen Saver
• Adding Files to the List for Screen Saver by Drag and Drop
• Adding Files to the List by AutoScan
• Adding Files to the List by Manual select
• Undo Delete
• Samples Are Included
• Limitations
• Known Bugs
• Turn on Debug
• Quick Troubleshooting
• Palette Flash and Picture Display in 256 Colors Mode
• Tips
• Special Notes
• Comments and Questions
• Copyright Notice and Trademarks

What Is It?

LaKeyÒ Screen Saver is a customizable multimedia screen saver. This screen saver not only comes with a unique built-in animation it can also play your favorite videos, pictures and sound as a screen saver. The user-friendly graphic user interface can help you to tune this screen saver in a snap. One click and the AutoScan feature will automatically scan your PC for all the pictures, sound, and video. Then make these files ready for LaKeyÒ Screen Saver. Alternatively, you can handpick your favorite media such as picture, sound, and video for LaKeyÒ Screen Saver as well. Plus, the preview feature lets you "see" and "hear" immediately while you are doing the media selection.

Why Screen Savers?

Screen savers are pretty pictures or patterns you display on your monitor whenever the computer is on but inactive. You use screen savers because they are decorative and they prevent an unchanging image from "burning in" and damaging the coated inner surface of your screen.

System Requirements

• IBM-PC or compatible with a 486SX-based CPU or better, running at 33 MHz or faster.
• 16 MB of system RAM
• Microsoft WindowsÒ 95 or higher
• VGA or better, 640x480, 256 colors or higher, 24-bit true colors recommended.
• MPC-compatible sound card (optional)
• MPC compliant CD-ROM drive, 300 KB/sec (2X speed) or faster (optional)
• 1 MB hard disk space
• Mouse (optional)

Installing LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä

To set up LaKeyÒ Screen Saver, you do

1. Identify the drive letter of the CD-ROM drive in your machine. Insert CD to the drive.
2. Click Windows Start button. From within Windows 95/98ä Start up window, choose the Run command.
3. From the Run dialog, enter your drive letter followed by the word SETUP. For example, if your CD-ROM is installed as D drive, then you would type D:\SETUP
4. Choose OK
5. If the setup process is successfully, you should see a Setup Complete dialog something like this at the end of setup

    6. Click Finish button to complete setup.

Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä

To start screen saver you need to follow these instructions:

1. Run Setup.exe to install screen saver. See Installing LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98 in previous section.
2. You need the Windows Screen Saver tab on the Display Properties sheet, which you open by pointing to a blank part of the desktop. Then right-clicking and choosing Properties from the popup menu. As you can see, the Display Properties sheet contains a collection of options, one of them is Screen Saver. Click and choose Screen Saver tab.
3. In the Screen saver dialog, choose the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver from the Screen Saver list. You should see a bouncing pumpkin appear in the preview "screen" at the top of the window. The figure shows the actual screen shot:



4. By default, the item used for LaKeyÒ Screen Saver is Built-in Animation which is a bouncing pumpkin. You can customize the screen saver by clicking the button labeled Settings. See next section Graphic User Interface vs. Dialog User Interface for the appearance of Settings dialog box. Also see section How to Customize LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for advanced settings.

5. For a full-screen preview showing what the screen saver will look like, click the Preview button and hold the mouse perfectly still.
6. When you are satisfied, click OK. You may click Apply if you want to continue working with this screen saver, when you are all done, clicks OK.

Graphic User Interface vs. Dialog User Interface

You can customize the screen saver by clicking the button labeled Settings in the Windows Screen Saver tab on the Display Properties sheet. See previous section Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä for starting the screen saver. In this section we will introduce the appearance of the user interface when you click on Settings button. If you are running Windows in 16 colors mode, you will see the old Windows dialog style user interface something like this

But if you are running Windows in 256 colors mode or higher such as high-color or 24-bit color mode, then you will see the new graphic user interface (GUI) something like this

At the first look, this new GUI looks like a web page but it has nothing to do with browser or HTML page. It was written totally in C++. Since web pages are so popular these days, it is proper to present user interface in web page style. As you can see, in this new GUI, you got hover buttons, one click for selection, and hyperlink. Usually, you click on hyperlink for media file selection.

How to Customize LaKeyÒ Screen Saver

Bring up Setting window for screen saver. You can refer to previous section Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä for how to bring up the Settings window or dialog box. Once you have brought up the settings dialog box for screen saver, you can change any settings by clicking on the Settings button. For example, you can select your favorite video AVI files for movie or for wallpaper, or choose your favorite picture and sound for screen saver. After you finished the settings, choose OK button to save the current settings for screen saver. The following table explains the usage of these customization options.

Adding Files to the List for Screen Saver by Drag and Drop

If you know where the video, picture and sound files are, you can add those files by drag and drop. To add files to the File Selected list, follow these steps:

1. Choose the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver as screen saver. See Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä section for details.
2. Click the Settings button, the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver Settings window appears. Choose either Picture/Sound or Video then click the Select Files button or the hyperlink that say "click here".
3. If you choose Picture/Sound, then a Picture and Sound Selection window appears. If you choose Video, then a Video Selection window appears.
4. Select the files you want to add to the list from any desktop window, Windows Explorer, or Find dialog box.
5. Drag and drop the files into the Files Selected list.

Adding Files to the List by AutoScan

If you don’t know where the video, picture and sound files are, you can use the AutoScan command to add files to the screen saver.

The Auto Scan feature allows you to find the proper media files, such as video files (AVI), picture files (BMP) and sound files (WAV and MID), for LaKeyÒ Screen Saver automatically. It searches files in all the hard disks (the disk that cannot be removed from the drive of your PC), the remote (network) drive, the CD-ROM drives, and the RAM disk, if any. By default, it does not search the drive that can be removed from the drive such as floppy disk, zip drive. If you want Auto Scan to search files in these drives or in a specific folder, you can click the Browse button to select a drive (or folder), click Ok to save that drive (or folder) then click on Auto Scan button.

You can reset the default drives for Auto Scan. To reset Auto Scan to default, you click the Browse button, then click on Cancel button. Next time when you click Auto Scan again, it will start the search on all the drives.

To add files to the File Selected list automatically, follow these steps:

1. Choose the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver as screen saver. See Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä section for details.
2. Click Settings button, the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver Settings window appears. Click the Select Files button or hyperlink that say "click here".
3. If you choose Picture/Sound, then a Picture and Sound Selection window appears. If you choose Video, Video Selection window appears.
4. Choose automatic files scanning by clicking the AutoScan button. File with proper type e.g. foo.bmp, doo.wav, etc, found by automatic scanning will be inserted in the Files Selected list.
5. You can stop the scanning process at any time by clicking the Stop button.
6. You can delete, undo delete, or clear all the selections by using the Delete, Undo Delete and Clear All buttons.

Adding Files to the List by Manual Select

To add files to the File Selected list manually, follow these steps:

1. Choose the LaKeyÒ Screen Saver as screen saver. See Starting LaKeyÒ Screen Saver for Windows 95/98ä section for details.
2. Click Settings button, LaKeyÒ Screen Saver Settings window appears. Choose either Picture/Sound or Video then click the Select Files button.
3. If you choose Picture/Sound, then a Picture and Sound Selection window appears. If you choose Video, then a Video Selection window appears.
4. Choose manual file selection by clicking the Manual button. The Select Files window appears.
5. Select the file you want then click Open to end the selection, or click Cancel to abort.
6. File selected will appear in the Files Selected list.

Undo Delete

You can undo your deletion while you are still in the selection dialog. Once you leave the selection section by clicking on either <Cancel> or <Ok> button, the buffer that maintains all the delete history will be gone forever. That means you will not be able to undo any deletions after you click the Cancel or Ok button.

Samples Are Included

LaKeyÒ Screen Saver comes with twelve bitmap pictures. There are also free digital video and picture files you can download from our web site. You can add these files to the list for screen saver by using the methods described in the previous sections. See Adding Files to the List for Screen Saver by Drag and Drop, Adding Files to the List by AutoScan, Adding Files to the List by Manual Select for details.

Limitations

You use screen savers because they prevent an unchanging image from "burning in" and damaging the coated inner surface of your screen. However, it always takes too long for PC to open a big file. Any image on the screen will be kept unchanged while screen saver is opening a file. In order to minimize the file opening time and keep image changing as soon as possible, we limit the file size to 1.2M bytes. If you selected a file that is bigger than that size, the screen saver will skip it. This limitation is only applied to the picture and sound files. Video should not be affected.

Known Bugs

On some of the systems, click Home key while you are in the Display Properties window may get a page fault from WINMM or MMSYSTEM. You need to reboot your system.

Turn on Debug

To narrow down a problem, LaKeyÒ Screen Saver provides you a way to debug program at run time. When program is running in debug mode, two lines of message will be displayed on the top of your desktop window. The display looks like this:

(BMP shown, WAV/MID skipped) 45=C:\Windows\Media\foo.wav
(Playing) 6=C:\Windows\Media\sound.mid

Or

(BMP shown, WAV/MID skipped) 45=C:\Windows\Media\foo.bmp
(Failed) 6=C:\Windows\Media\sound.mid

These messages try to tell you which file is currently playing and which one has been skipped because screen saver restricts your computer to play one kind of sound (MIDI or Wave) at a time. Any files on the queue will be skipped and wait for their turn in the next cycle. It also shows you which sound file has problem for screen saver to open, if any.

To turn on debug mode, you do

1. Go to your Windows folder, usually it is located at C:\Windows, and open VideoIT.ini file with notepad.
2. In the VideoIT.ini file, you will see something like this

[Screen Saver.VideoIT]
ObjectUsed=0
Audio=1
Clear Screen=0
ClearOnStart=1
Timer=50
SlidePos=0
PlayBackStyle=2


3. Insert the following line under the header [Screen Saver.VideoIT]

[Screen Saver.VideoIT]
Debug=yes

4. After insertion it looks like this

[Screen Saver.VideoIT]
Debug=yes
ObjectUsed=0
Audio=1
Clear Screen=0
ClearOnStart=1
Timer=50
SlidePos=0
PlayBackStyle=2


5. Save the VideoIT.ini file, and then run La Key screen saver.

If you choose Build-in Animation object for screen saver then you need to read this section. The bitmap file pumpkin.bmp is used for display resolution that is less than or equal to 256 colors only. If your monitor can display more than 256 colors than this file is obsolete. In case that your monitor can display only 256 colors and pumpkin.bmp is missing or being altered then a build-in bitmap will be used to display 16 colors for your 8-bit resolution settings.

The original screen saver program from La Key Software has a file name called "LaKey Screen Saver.scr". You should not change or alter this name in any way. Otherwise, the program will not work properly.

Copyright © 1999 - 2002 by La Key Software