Running Windows 98 Screensaver on XP?

I have a friend that has XP but wants to run a screensaver from his old Windows 98 machine. It is the "Space" screensaver...not sure if it was on Plus or the regular 98 OS. How can I help him?

 

find the .SCR file for 'space' from his \windows\system directory and copy it over to \winxp\system32.

 

You might also have to add "ss" infront of the file name... I found I had to with quite a few older screensavers I installed.

For example if the scr file is called space.scr you might have to change it to ssspace.scr....

I didn't have to do it to all of them but for some reason I had to for others...

 

Copied off Disk

I copied the space.scr off a Windows 98 SE disk and put it in the windows system32 folder but it would not run. hmmm

 

You need to get your hands on DEPENDS.EXE (from the support tools, resource kit, lots of other places) or something similar in freeware

My guess is that this thing has some auxillary DLL files it will also need. See the attached screen shot. I am missing USBD.SYS. Use the same methodology to resolve your dependants, and it should work.

 

The depends program tells me;

Warning: At least one module has an unresolved import due to a missing export function in a delay-load dependent module.

MPR.DLL

 

look down in the middle pane. nothing else about missing files?

Shucks. Well, only other thing is to open up Mark's REGMON against it running to see whats going on. Perhaps a regkey it needs to launch correctly.

A helpful tip in getting this running under regmon, this way you can launch the screen saver from a dos prompt.

Code:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>copy  ssstars.scr sstars.exe
        1 file(s) copied.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>sstars.exe/s

Also /c will invoke the configuration screen. try that before doing the regmon thing above. Maybe it will autocreate the keys it needs.

Lastly, can you just figure out what software package it came from and install it

 

Cabinet WIN98_33.CAB

05-11-1998 8:01:00p A--- 57,344 mpr.dll

I don't know if it's significant but the version in XP is of a different size. Shouldn't matter but...

Directory of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

08/04/2004 01:56 AM 59,904 mpr.dll
1 File(s) 59,904 bytes

 

I copied the space.scr off a Windows 98 SE setup disk.

 

I tried a couple of them from win98 themes and got the same error message on both (though different from mojo13's) . See the attached pic. My guess is that they won't run on XP but somebody might know something I don't. It would seem with these that there's a problem with the version of kernel32.dll in XP. At least that would be my best guess from the error message I get. Can't say for sure. Entry points in dll's aren't my thing.

 

XP already has that file...I don't think I should overwrite it with that old of a version.

 

I don't either since it SHOULD be backward compatible anyway. I just butted in to mention the point for academia.

I'll extract Space.scr and see what I can do with it.

 

I think I'll just tell him to download a screensaver that is similar to that one.

 

Rename it to ssWL32SCR.SCR and see what you get.

 

Same blank screen...

 

Thanks Zander, that screenie was just what we needed. That screensaver uses one of the undocumented, (and now unsupported) GDI calls from the old win98 days.

Looking through the appcompat shims in the AppCompat tool, I dont see anything that will fix it, looks like you are out of luck on this one.

But wait, for only 29.95$, you can have the new and impoved SpaceXP screensave in the XP Plus pack!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/plus/screensavers.asp