The Story of VRMan3D
If you had a Windows 95/98 box with a 3D card in the late 1990s, there’s a good chance VRMan lit up your screen at some point. VRMan3D is the handle of Fred Cass, a 3D graphics developer who spent the Win9x era pushing early Direct3D hardware far beyond screensaver duty— flying through wormholes, orbiting gravitrons, and decorating a fully 3D Christmas tree while holiday music played in the background.
This archive pulls his classic screensavers back together. This section shares the story behind them.
Early VR experiments
Before the screensavers, VRMan was already deep into real‑time 3D and “virtual worlds”:
- Worked with Digital Equipment Corporation on a 3D application called VisualReality that shipped with their Celebris GL machines. VisualReality let users fly around a 3D environment and launch bundled tools from within the world—a very mid‑90s vision of VR as your desktop.
- Experimented with early 3D accelerator hardware from Matrox, NEC, and 3dfx Voodoo, including stereo 3D and head‑mounted displays long before consumer VR returned.
By the time consumer Direct3D cards and Windows screensavers collided, the ingredients were there to turn a humble screen‑blanker into a 3D demo.
The screensavers that went semi‑legendary
3D Tidal Forces / TidalForcesXL
3D Tidal Forces is often the first name people remember.
- Fly through glowing tunnels that morph into different patterns
- Semi‑transparent blocks explode outward and whip past you
- That strange, otherworldly feeling the longer you stare
“...may be one of the coolest screen savers ever.” — ZDNet
- Up to 999 3D objects tugged by 10 “gravitrons”
- Adjustable gravity in real time
- Techno soundtrack and optional stereoscopic glasses
- DirectX 7‑optimized physics and rendering
For many, Tidal Forces felt less like “idle mode” and more like a tiny, looping demoscene production.
vrChristmas / 3DChristmas (the big hit)
“The world famous VRMan Christmas Virtual Reality Screensaver – downloaded over 4 million times!”
- Fully 3D, accelerated Christmas tree
- Ornaments float through space and snap onto branches
- Holiday music and animated lights
For many Win9x PCs, it was their first real taste of 3D acceleration—and the first time a screensaver felt like a little virtual world.
vrFireWorks
- Physics‑driven fireworks arcing and exploding in 3D
- Crowd audio and ambient sound for a “mini event” feel
- Lots of particles—borderline ridiculous for the hardware of the day
On a packed CRT, vrFireWorks looked like a tiny festival inside your monitor.
vrFlightSaver
More obscure than Tidal Forces or vrChristmas, but with a cult following:
“I had a screensaver around ’99 which was similar called ‘vrFlightSaver’ by VRMan3D in which you could drop balloons with paint onto a big bullseye on the ground.”
Years later, people still remember the stunt‑plane mental image—and it was a screensaver, not a full game.
VRMan in the dev scene
VRMan didn’t just toss binaries on download sites—he hung out in game‑dev forums (notably the DarkBASIC Pro / The Game Creators community), sharing tools and war stories.
vrSnap.dll and the “Holy cow, dad!” moment
- vrSnap.dll: capture the desktop and save BMP/PNG/JPG in one call
- Posted sample code for DarkBASIC Pro and invited community projects
“Holy cow that is cool dad! Can I have a copy of that?” — VRMan’s son
His signature said it all: World Famous 3D Screensavers — vrman3d.com.
The great source‑code disaster
In a 2008 blog post, VRMan explains that his source code was deliberately trashed and backups destroyed. Re‑building would mean starting from scratch. It’s part loss, part motivation to remake the classics—and part of why this archive exists at all.
The 1997 logo and the Voodoo card
A 2004 post shows a “fully functioning replica of a VRMan logo, circa 1997”—a 3D airplane (from vrFlightSaver) flying over a real 3dfx Voodoo board, created with help from designer =[ Aegis ]=.
Stress‑testing early 3D cards
One review of the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo² noted hangs after running Need for Speed II SE and certain screensavers—including one by VRMan—until the card was underclocked. Accidental torture tests for early GPUs.
How people remember VRMan now
- Retro & nostalgia threads recalling the Christmas tree and Tidal Forces
- Dev forum archives with physics and rendering deep‑dives
- This archive, keeping files runnable and the history preserved
If you have original ZIPs, screenshots, magazine CD references, or reviews—we’d love to add them here.
