As of Febuary 26, 2005, I will no longer be selling MetaScope. Instead I am giving it away, and will soon be publishing the source code.

I am doing this for two very simple reasons:

1) Economics. Most people are not willing to pay for screensavers (even very good ones, like Metascope). The money I receive from ads on the Krazydad website now exceeds the money I get from the occasional Metascope sale. By giving away Metascope, I hope to increase the traffic to the website, and thereby make more money.

2) Efficiency. I am spread pretty thin these days. By making Metascope an open source project, more programmers (with more time on their hands) will be able to tweak it, improve it, and bring it to other platforms (like the Mac!). This will ultimately provide a more satisfying experience to the users of Metascope, and bring it to more people, thus furthering my plan to eventually conquer the world. Or something like that.

The version of MetaScope now on the website (version 1.2) is free and fully featured. I will soon be posting the (Windows) source code for this version via a link to SourceForge.

I will continue to provide support for paid users of Metascope, however, they are no longer bound by the license agreement. I suggest that these users uninstall the old (paid) version of Metascope and download and install the new free version, as it does not contain any piracy protection features, like the old version did. Otherwise, it is functionally identical. I would like to thank all the paid users for supporting this project during the past two years.

More technically inclined users may be interested to know that Metascope uses the Lua scripting language, and that most of the Metascope functionality is contained in a text script (data/Metascope.lua) which can be edited and modified.

This provides the basis for a very powerful script-driven screensaver. In the future, I hope that developers will provide new interesting replacement scripts and patches to run on the Metascope engine, especially after it is properly documented.

The KrazyDad website was originally setup as an online store for shareware products, and some parts of the website have not yet made the transition to free software site. Please bear with me during this transitional period as I redo those parts of the website.

-- Jim Bumgardner