Johnny Castaway's FAQ

Lots of people write to me about problems they are having with Johnny, and here are some of the common ones. The answers may help you!

If you want a text-only version, which may be easier to print out, click here.

Q: How can I get hold of the Johnny Castaway screen saver? A: It is available from a number of sites (the screen saver itself is the same, no matter where you get it from). Click on Download Johnny on the menu bar (or the icon on the right here) to get a number of links.

A: Johnny is only available for a PC running Windows (3.x, 9x, NT, 2000, XP). However, you can run Johnny on a Mac if you have a PC emulator such as Virtual PC (thanks to Gene Feierstein for that information).

A: johncast.exe is the self-extracting zipped file that you get from everyone except screensavers.com. When run, it will expand into ten files - for more details, see the Help in Downloading Page. Screensavers have a files called JohnnyCastaway.exe, and running that will install Johnny.

A: Sierra have sold the rights to screensavers.com. There was a suggestion that they might develop it, but nothing has appeared so far.

The version that is available for download from the various sites seems to be slightly later than some that are around, and it may have had one or two bugs fixed. The files are dated 4 Jan 1993, and the time stamp suggests they are version 1.01. Other files I've seen are dated 11 Sep 1992. If you've got the "old" version, and you have problems with crashes, it might be worth your while to download the later version.

A: No. I don't think there has been a resource.002. It can take weeks, months, or even years before you see all the scenes.

A: When you first start Johnny, the raft that he's building is very small, and it grows bigger over the next few days. I think the time you put in the settings determines when this growth occurs.

A: If this box is not checked, Johnny and his island will be surrounded by blank screen. If it is checked, you see the sea and sky.

A: Tricky one this, as Windows error messages don't always (or often) mean what they say. It is possible that it's looking for a temporary directory. For Windows 3.x this is defined in your autoexec.bat file as

set temp=

It's usually called C:\TEMP -- if it's missing, the screen saver doesn't install properly, so check that it exists, and if not, create it with File Manager. The 200K bit means that it needs that amount of free space on your hard disc, which you should have, unless you're very short of space. If you can't get it to install automatically, you can always do it by hand - see the next question but one for details.

A: (from Jack Smith): Experimentation wins. I succeeded by moving johncast.exe into the temp directory before running [on a Windows 95 system]. Same thing on a 3.1 machine as well, although others with similar configs had no problem.

A: If you run the setup program from JohnnyCastaway.exe or johncast.exe, the files will end up in the right place. However, if you're installing the non-screensavers.com version by hand, there are four files:

scrantic.ini  (about 200 bytes)
scrantic.scr  (295,952 bytes)
resource.001  (1,175,645 bytes)
resource.map  (1,461bytes)

The two "scrantic" files go into the main windows directory (usually C:\windows), with the two "resource" files going in C:\sierra\scrantic by default (you can specify a diffent folder if you wish when you install Johnny. Don't be tempted to edit scrantic.ini to put the resource files in a different directory &/or drive. This works in Windows 3.x, but if you do this in Windows 9x, you may find that the program says that it can't find the data files! If you want to change the location of the resource files, re-install by running setup.exe again.

You set the saver up from Control Panel in the usual way - it's called "Screen Antics".

A: In a word no! See Sierra's Readme file.

A: This is connected with the McAfee VirusScan program - full details are on the Bugs Page, but in essence don't "enable scanning in screen saver mode".

A: The scenes are pseudo-random — some of the "rare" scenes only come up after you have been running the screen saver for several days or weeks — see the Story Page for details of when some of the scenes appear. They may then appear several times during a day, and then not been seen again for a while. So, if a particular scene crashes on your system, if you disable Johnny for a day or two, you will probably be able to run him again for another few days or weeks without any trouble.

A: Not quite like Johnny — although Andrej Kilian has pointed out that the US Mint's Coinhuna screen saver has some Johnny-like features. You can get it from www.bildschirmschoner.de/savers/content/DContent0123.html or direct from the Mint's web site - www.usmint.gov/downloads/screen_savers/coinhuna.exe

Anyone else got a candidate?

A: No.

A: Not really a Johnny Castaway question, but several people have asked. To capture an image of whatever is on your PC's screen, simply hit the <Prt Sc> key (this is labelled <Print Screen> on some keyboards). This saves an image of the screen on the Clipboard, and you can paste it into any graphics package (such as Paint, which comes as part of Win95) and edit and/or save it. But be warned, the file is in .bmp format by default, and it is big - over 1 Mbyte

By the way, if you just want to capture a system message, the procedure's the same, but you press <Alt><Prt Sc>

Please don't send me screen pictures, unless they show rare scenes that aren't already pictured on the site. If you do send pictures, I would much appreciate it if you ZIP .bmp files, or send the files as gifs or jpgs, otherwise it could take me a long time to download them (and you a long time to upload them, unless you have a very fast connection). My mail reader is normally set to reject large emails, so if you make them too big, I'll never see them!

A: Can't think why anyone would want to do this! ;-) But if you feel you must, you can choose another screen saver, or "None", from the Control Panel, without uninstalling Johnny. You can remove him if you got him from anywhere but screensavers by deleting the folder (directory) C:\SIERRA\SCRANTIC and its contents, and the files SCRANTIC.INI and SCRANTIC.SCR from the Windows directory. To remove the screensavers version, delete JohnCast.001, JohnCast.ini, JohnCast.map & JohnCast.scr, all in the Windows directory.

If you have problems not covered on this page, or the Bugs and Download Help pages, or if the advice given here doesn't help, please feel free to email me, , — I don't guarantee to be able to help, but I'll do my best!

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