Over the past year, RoccoLox Programs, Merthsoft, and I have been working on a screensaver program for the TI-84 Plus CE, called ScreenSaver (who would've guessed)! The program uses a hook which ties into TI's APD timer, so when it is enabled it will replace the TI-OS APD functionality. This means that instead of your calculator turning off after inactivity, it will instead trigger a fun screensaver animation! RoccoLox initially had the idea for this during the Cemetech screensaver contest, but decided he'd rather flesh out the idea a bit more before publishing it.

Currently, the program (now an app thanks to OS 5.8.3) has 6 completed animations, with three by Rocco and I and three from Merth. There's also a placeholder "Hello World" option, and an incomplete always-on display inspired clock. Right now, you can select the animation you'd like from the app's main menu, and then the hook will call it in place of APD.

GitHub repository

Eye Candy
Main menu


Hello world


Flying toasters (Rocco and I)


Pipes (Rocco and I)


Fish (Merthsoft, currently it crashes for some reason so no screenshot)

Random walk (Merthsoft)


Tiles (Rocco and I)


Spirograph (Merthsoft)


What's next?
More animations! And screensaver-specific settings. We'd also like to have some sort of preview, but we haven't decided on how to implement that yet.

This is really nice! Have you considered adding the ability to make your own screensavers?

Looks like you can use the "turtle" header file for creating your custom screensavers!

A boids animation and custom backgrounds would be nice too 😁

Very cool! Any plans to let APD trigger after the program has run for a certain amount of time? Would prevent it from killing your battery unintentionally...

The repository is set up in such a way that it shouldn't be too difficult to add your own animations! The main thing to note is that the heap is limited to only use pixelShadow2.



The turtle library is merth's turtle graphics library! It's not strictly necessary for making an animation, but you can make some pretty cool stuff with it (as shown in merth's animations).



Not a bad idea! We'll work on adding a setting for a screensaver display timer which would turn off the calculator.

Love this idea, very fun!


In a similar vein, a setting to automatically lower brightness would be cool.

A little extra eye candy as I work on a Matrix Rain screensaver!



Glyphs by v3x3d on itch.

It's using sprites right now but I'm going to move it to a font for performace. Also, I will be making the random walk a better random walk, and would like to add a Triss implementation as well 🙂 And some other ideas kicking around!

We've worked on making the menu a little nicer, along with adding epsilon's suggestion to turn off the calculator after the animation has run for a certain amount of time.



Right now the timer can be set in 5 minute intervals from 5-45 minutes, or disabled. This isn't set in stone though so feel free to give any opinions / feedback!

I font-ified the Matrix:

Looks great! The performance is much better too 🙂

Thanks, tr1p!

Today I fixed the random walk so it looks more like a random walk again:

We made a little clock (probably not doing any actual screen saving but kind of neat maybe):

ignore the date, forgot to post about this two days ago

Nice clock!

I added Triss:

Smoother on-calc

Doesn't work on Mac due to / vs \, any chance someone could build it and send it?

I switched it over to forward slashes (not sure why it was initially \ since windows supports / anyway?) so hopefully it should work now 🙂

Realized I could copy triss and make a few small changes and boom, beziers


Also made a nice snow effect:

Wow! This looks incredible! I especially like the flying toasters, and the tiles. The snowflakes by Merth are also rather satisfying.

Oop, now I get



Definitely something wrong with -i going on here, echo ${BINDIR} returns nothing.

Location: animations/makefile

It looks like it's just not finding convbin on your system.

You just did not install the toolchain correctly.