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: 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: 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.

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! Please include the phrase Johnny Castaway in the subject line, or your message is liable to get lost in the ocean od spam I get every day!

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