I’m writing a screensaver in Visual Basic. Several of the online tutorials I’ve read on the subject say that the “Application Title” (on the “Make Tab” in the “Project Properties” window) needs to be changed so that it starts with "SCRNSAVE: "
The screensaver seems to work perfectly well whether I make this change to the Application Title or not. Is this something that only mattered for older windows versions, or does changing the Application Title actually make a difference?
It’s a deprecated behaviour from 16-bit Windows, Windows 95 and 98.
The purpose was to allow the screensaver to set the name that would be displayed in the dropdown list in the display properties dialogue.
The 32-bit versions of Windows no longer use the “SCRNSAVE:…” method to retrieve the name. Instead a system of reading the embedded string resources from the executable is used.
None of this is really necessary since if you don’t explicitly support these methods in your program the OS will default to showing the filename of the screensaver without the “.scr” extension. It’s easiest just to compile the screensaver with a descriptive filename.
That clears it up. Thanks.