Help wanted
Missing VRMan screensavers
This archive has the programs we could recover. Several others are known to have existed, and nobody has found a copy yet. If one of them is sitting on an old hard drive, a CD or a backup, you could bring it back.
What we're looking for
- 3D Swim: an aquarium screensaver. VRMan's old site quoted a customer calling it "the best aquarium screensaver I've seen yet." No download was saved.
- 3D SnowDesk: freeware that piled up to 20,000 3D snowflakes along the bottom of the Windows desktop and turned the mouse into a snowblower. A screenshot was saved, but not the ZIP.
- XmasDesk: named on the old pages. We know nothing else about it.
- The car saver and volcanovr: a car screensaver and a volcano project, both named on the old pages without details.
- TidalForcesXL: the paid upgrade of Tidal Forces, mentioned in a 1999 Japanese review. The Tidal Forces 3.0 readme describes what the paid version added.
- The full vrFlightSaver: the radio-controlled plane that drops paint balloons. We recovered the 3.0 demo (see FlightSaver), but not the full version.
- VRChristmas 2.0 and earlier: the 1998 releases. Only version 3.0 (
vrxmas30) is in this archive. - Old readmes, screenshots and web pages from the vrman.com years, before the Wayback Machine started saving them.
- Source code: Fred wrote in 2008 that his source code is gone. If anyone received a copy, or has a build with debug files, that would be the most valuable find of all.
Where these might be hiding
- Magazine cover CDs from 1998 to 2003. Tidal Forces 2.1 was on the Datatid cover CD in February 2000, so others may have appeared on similar discs.
- Old shareware collections, desktop theme bundles and PCs that came with screensavers pre-installed. vrFireWorks, for example, turned up in a 1999 desktop theme.
- Backups of old Windows 98, ME and XP machines, especially the
C:\WindowsandC:\Windows\Systemfolders, where.scrfiles live. - Old downloads folders and ZIP files. Worth searching for:
vrxmas,3dswim,snowdesk,xmasdesk,vrman.
If you find something, please get in touch with the file name, its size and where it came from. Don't run or send anything you're unsure about. Tell me what you have first, and we can check the file's checksum against what's known before anything is shared.
Memories help too: a magazine disc you remember, a PC that came with the screensavers, a review or a forum post. Any of it can point to a copy.
Everything recovered is shared here with Fred Cass's permission. See the story of VRMan for the history, and how to run the recovered programs on Windows 10 and 11.