
Last year (it passed me by at the time, alas), someone even realised my fond dream of the time - to create a version of 3D Maze I could play myself. Were its creators conscious that they had made something people would gawp at for hours, locked in a state of unmet anticipation? Or did they just think they were making some pretty walls? I wonder about the thinking behind 3D Maze. Mostly it was just more low-resolution brick walls. I watched and watched, forever feeling as though something magnificent was around the next automatically-navigated corner.

WINDOWS 95 MAZE SCREENSAVER VIDEO WINDOWS
If you leave our popular maze screensaver running for 72 hours straight you will finally. The classic 3D maze screensaver that shipped with Windows 95 and 98. Includes the Maze Screensaver and Windows NT4 3D Text screensaver. Some say Windows 95 is a mere graphical interface for MS-DOS. As its name implies, it consists of a randomly-generated maze rendered in. I read a lot of books, but I was endlessly drawn to the PC. Most of the screensavers from Windows XP and Windows 98. 3D MazeExplanation A screensaver included with every version of Windows up to Me. We lived in the country, the nearest friend was a half-hour bus ride away, there was no internet. In the absence of money to buy new games, I'd fire up 3D Maze more often than I should. It randomly moves through a maze with red. Therefore, exciting, as my young mind had by then been programmed to think of anything involving a first-person perspective and lots of walls. The classic 3D maze screensaver that shipped with Windows 95 and 98.

By which I mean, watched it for hours.ģD Maze was a screensaver first bundled with Windows 95, notable primarily because:Ī) it was one of the more instant ways to make your computer seem all futuristic after succumbing to the Win 95 hypeī) it looked a whole lot like an early first-person shooter, a Wolfenstein or Doom One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. It didn't help that the official Windows screensaver API made it difficult to write a screen saver using Direct3D.Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. There were at least some third-party screensavers that used Direct3D, but they were very uncommon. You can only use it if you have the DirectX SDK installed. Some sort of random shapes or artwork occasionally appeared in it (my memory. When I was a kid I was always mad how bad the AI would navigate the maze and wished I could do it myself. It seemed to rotate and move from the perspective of someone moving through it. This is the 3D Maze from the screensaver in Windows 95. There was a painfully slow reference rasterizer before that, but it has never been part of Windows or the DirectX end-user installs. I used Windows 95 for a while in the late 90s, and while setting my preferences for the desktop wallpaper, screensaver and such, I noticed that Windows 95 had a spiffy 'maze' screensaver.

WINDOWS 95 MAZE SCREENSAVER VIDEO SOFTWARE
Direct3D never got a practical software renderer that you could use in production applications until Windows 7. While DirectX became a standard part of Windows with Windows 95 OSR2, by the time you could pretty much always depend on 3D hardware support (some time during the Windows XP era), these screensavers were no longer being included with Windows. In theory, these screensavers could have been rewritten to use Direct3D in later releases of Windows, but that never happened. (In fact, I'm not sure there was any hardware support for OpenGL on Windows 95 when it first came out.)Īt least some of these 3D screensavers-in particular, 3D Pipes-were actually introduced in Windows NT 3.5, a year before Windows 95 came out. On the other hand, OpenGL could fall back to software rending if hardware acceleration wasn't available. This is a fun screensaver pack for those that long for the good old days. This pack contains ten separate screensavers to choose from, including Flying Windows, floating Windows XP Logo, Pipes, Maze, Windows NT4 3D Text screensaver, and more. Now you can step inside that maze as a nostalgic if not exactly good video game. Windows XP And 98 Screensavers is a nostalgic display of classic Windows screensavers. This was a virtual necessity for two reasons: (1) the original version of Windows 95 didn't ship with any version of DirectX, and (2) the Direct3D API required hardware acceleration that most PCs of the time wouldn't have had. If you remember Windows 95, you might recall its 3D maze screensaver. All of the classic 3D screensavers (3D Maze, 3D Pipes, 3D Flying Objects, 3D Text, and 3D Flower Box) used OpenGL instead of DirectX.
