Marquee Plus

Marquee Plus is a screensaver similar to the standard Scrolling Marquee screensaver of Windows, but it has more features.

Perhaps you think that having the same message scrolling across your screen over and over again might get a little boring? Well, Marquee Plus is for you! Marquee Plus allows you to specify not just one message, but a whole file-full of them! The 'Message File' option lets you select any text file on your computer, and Marquee Plus will then pick a line from it at random to use as your message. Every so often, it will go back and pick a new message - so you need never get bored! You can even specify how often your message should be changed.

Marquee Plus can now take messages from your message files in sequential order, instead of at random. You can even divide your files up into sections, and Marquee Plus will show each section's messages in order, before randomly selecting another section to display. This is great for displaying poetry or other multi-lined information files.

Your can have your chosen Marquee Plus text scrolling across the screen at random angles, instead of always going horizontally across the screen.

If your computer is part of a TCP/IP network (most office networks will qualify), you can configure Marquee Plus to communicate with any other computers on your network that are also running Marquee Plus. If you do this, then when the screen-saver starts, you will see not only your own Marquee Plus text, but also that of up to twenty other computers on your network!

When communicating over the network, Marquee Plus can be set to use one of 21 different channels; your computer will then only receive Marquee Plus messages from other computers that are using the same channel as you. This lets you and your colleagues set up 'private' Marquee Plus groups without being swamped by messages from the whole corporate network.

You can have the date and/or the time and/or a countdown string displayed, in addition to your own scrolling message. The countdown defaults to count down to Christmas 2000, but can be reconfigured to count the days to your birthday, retirement or any other point in time!

Instead of having each message string appearing in a fixed colour, you can select 'colour-cycling' and have the colours gently fading from one to another in a constantly changing display. (This requires at least a 16-bit colour display mode to look its best.)

If you use a MAPI-compliant email system (such as MS Exchange/Outlook) Marquee Plus will check your inbox and display a message to let you know if you have any unread mails waiting. So now you can tell at a glance if you've received any new mails while you were away from your computer, without having to unlock the screen saver first! (This feature won't work on Windows NT or 2000 due to the extra security in those operating systems - make sure you "try before you buy").