Screen Antics: Johnny Castaway was a Windows 3.1 screensaver made by Dynamix and published by Sierra in 1992: a man stranded on a tiny island who fishes, builds sandcastles, waves at passing ships and works through a story over many days. The original no longer runs on modern Windows.
open-scrantic is a new engine for it, written in Rust by Glauber Lima (MIT licence). It reads the original files and plays them as the old screensaver did. We have made installers for Windows and Linux.
The current version is 0.5.0-k1 (12 November 2026): open-scrantic 0.5.0 with two changes:
–cover-others shows the island on the main monitor and turns the other monitors black.
Downloads: https://kalretro.au/open-scrantic/, the Heisenbergs Files area on the BBS, or the FTP server (folder open-scrantic).
The pictures, animations and sounds belong to their owners and are not included. You need three files from your own installed copy of Johnny Castaway:
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
SCRANTIC.SCR | the original screensaver program |
RESOURCE.MAP | the index of its pictures and scripts |
RESOURCE.001 | the pictures, animation scripts and sounds |
Use the files from an installed copy (usually C:\WINDOWS on the old PC). On the floppy disk RESOURCE.001 is a small placeholder and the real files are packed as SCRANTIC.SC$ and RESOURCE.00$.
open-scrantic-0.5.0-k1-windows-x64-setup.exe. If Windows says the program is not signed, click More info, then Run anyway.%APPDATA%\OpenScrantic.The Start menu gets Johnny Castaway (full screen) and Johnny Castaway (window). Uninstalling asks whether to keep your three files and the story progress.
The setup needs administrator rights, because Windows only lists screensavers kept in System32. If the administrator account is not the one you use every day, copy the three files to your own %APPDATA%\OpenScrantic afterwards.
Without the setup, the zip has open-scrantic.exe (put it next to the three files and run it) and open-scrantic.scr (copy it to C:\Windows\System32\OpenScrantic.scr and the three files to %APPDATA%\OpenScrantic).
For 64-bit PCs. It installs for your own account, in ~/.local/share/open-scrantic, with no root needed:
tar xf open-scrantic-0.5.0-k1-linux-x64.tar.gz cd open-scrantic-0.5.0-k1-linux-x64 ./install.sh --data ~/johnny # the folder with the three files ./install.sh --data ~/johnny --screensaver # and start it after 3 idle minutes ./install.sh --uninstall
You then have Johnny Castaway (open-scrantic) under Games in the menu and the command open-scrantic.
–screensaver uses swayidle (sudo apt install swayidle) and works on Wayland desktops such as KDE Plasma 6 and GNOME. It starts Johnny after three idle minutes and closes him when you move the mouse or press a key. To change the wait, edit 180 (seconds) in ~/.config/systemd/user/open-scrantic-idle.service and run systemctl –user restart open-scrantic-idle. If your desktop blanks or locks the screen at the same time, set its own timers later than that.
Esc closes it and F12 saves a screenshot next to the program.
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
–fullscreen | fill the screen instead of a window |
–cover-others | with –fullscreen: the other monitors go black |
–dedither | smooth the 1992 checkerboard dithering into solid colours |
–soft-audio | cleaner sound, without the 8-bit hiss |
–sounds=0 | no sound (also –clouds=0, –waves=0, –background=0) |
–help | the full list |
Settings and the story progress are kept in SCRANTIC.INI next to the three files, as in the original.
0.5.0-k1 was tried on Linux (KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland, two monitors) with the September 1992 files, and the Windows setup, program, screensaver and uninstaller under Wine. It has not yet been tried on a real Windows PC.
open-scrantic is Copyright © 2026 Glauber Lima, MIT licence: https://github.com/glauberlima/open-scrantic. The changes and installers in this build are by Michael Slater under the same licence; the source is in the downloads (open-scrantic-0.5.0-k1-source.tar.gz).
Johnny Castaway's art, animation and sounds belong to their owners; none of it is in the downloads.
Problems with the installers: slaterm@theiguru.au. Problems with the engine itself: the open-scrantic project.