Perhaps Jim will include Guppies when he introduces the fish feeding feature, they make excellent live food
for Angelfish! ;) ................ sorry, I couldn't resist that! :D

Maybe Jim could come up with an add-on pack for the Freshwater Aquarium. It could be called "Your Childhood Aquarium," and could include Guppies, Swordtails, Mollies, common Goldfish, a diver that sends up bubbles, your choice of a number of neon-colored gravels for the bottom of the tank, and various colored "crackle-glass" effects for the background. This pretty much describes my first aquarium, except I also had a ceramic castle that the fish could swim through. :)

We have a Goldfish Aquarium for Goldfish and which will possibly have a diver.

Freshwater Aquarium has a treasure chest that opens and bubbles come out. Probably the coolest thing in the tank. :)

Yeah, I can't wait to see the Treasure Chest and bubbles! It sounds fantastic. I won't want it on all the time, but now and then would be great.
My "Childhood Aquarium" post was kind of tongue in cheek, as I really wouldn't want to go back to that bygone aquarium. I remember how excited I was when the Swordtails and Black Mollies had babies, and how devastated I was when they ate them all. Also, when I made the mistake of introducing a 4" Red Oscar into a community tank. Talk about carnage!
It just seems alot of people really want guppies and goldfish in the same tank. Personally I'd rather have a tank with just umpteen different types of tetras, and maybe a plecostomus and a couple of loaches and catfish (the sparkly green ones are my favorites). However, I doubt Jim is going to make one just for me.
But, I'm sure I'll be more than happy with whatever he comes up with (as long as it's not neon gravel and crackle-glass backgrounds). :D

pleaaaaaaaaase jim, add guppies, they are so cuuuute and the screensaver's name is freshwater aquarium and not tropical freshwater aquarium. They are typical freshwater aquarium fish. So pleaaaaaaaase :D

It is a tropical aquarium. Someone else might want to do a guppie tank. I like to leave others as much latitude as I can, and not take too much for myself.

Very diplomatic Jim.:)

Guppies are tropical fish. They occur naturally in streams in Central and South America, in the tropics. That being said, I would prefer not to have them in Jim's tropical freshwater tank. There are plenty of other tropical freshwater fish that, in my opinion, are much preferable.

I agree with you, nreimer. Guppies are tropical fish, but they are actually quite temperature tolerant.

As a child I used to catch guppies in one of the Dutch canals, not exactly a place where one would expect to find them. The location was an industrial area in the town of Delft. The canal in question was being used for cooling heavy machinery and therefore would stay warm and never froze over during winter. Now apparently some joker had emptied a guppy tank in there and if you know anything about guppy birthrate you can guess what happened. At times there were so many that food supplies got kind of low. So I would simply toss in a slice of bread, which in no time would be covered with hungry guppies, some even jumping on top of it in their feeding frenzy. Then all I had to do was scoop them up by the dozens.

That's an interesting story MM. Are the lake and gippies still there? Go toss in another piece of bread and snap some shots for us. :)

Patrick, I don't think they are still there. This was some 30+ years ago. It was just a small canal in between a factory and the science lab where my father worked back then. My father has long since retired so even if there is anything recognizable left I would not be able to access this private property.

Guppies
 

I read with interest the debate about guppies.. personally i hate them, and would not like to see them.. But


i would like to point out here in the UK where i worked for many years as the 'specialist' in the fish house of one of the UKs largest aquatic outlets, that guppies were only ever sold as Tropical fish, and only advised for non heated tanks with perople that had centrally heated houses where the temperature is constant year round..

another thing with guppies, is they seem slow when in cooler tanks, and are most active and interesting in temps around about 75 degrees

Well said Searley, - (and welcome to the forum to another UK member!) - you are quite right!

I have tried making the same point, but these people from warmer climates seem determined to class them as none tropical, - strange! :) - I too am not keen to see them in Jim's Freshwater Aquarium, but a tropical tank is their rightful home in every book I have ever read!

cjmaddy - dont get me wrong, i dont like guppies, just my opinion!

i think is is because they are to common and i like something a little different, this is probably why i changed over to keeping marines..

one fish i would like to see is a red tail black shark, and or silver sharks, as these have always been a freshwater favorite of mine!

The average person might consider the Ferrari Dino a Ferrari. To anyone involved with the breed, it's a Fiat.

There will not be guppies in the Freshwater Tropical Tank.

Working on fish #4, a red-tailed shark at this moment.

Jim has beaten me to it! :)

I was just going to refer you to this:- :TU:

https://www.feldoncentral.com/forums...0&pagenumber=1

So does that mean we won't see any Fiats, either, in the Freshwater Tank? Awww...
:)

Oh cool, what about clown loaches?

We seem to be starting another wishlist thread here for some reason.

One more time....
Yes, there will be Clown Loaches.

Uhm sorry :/

Fresh Water Fishies sounds qual to me.

Just a quick update on what's happening.

I've been busy switching the Freshwater Aquarium from a DirectX6 base to a DirectX8.1 base. It's a tough job since most commands have different terminology and parameters. There are several reasons I have decided to do this now. When this issue first came up 3 years ago, nobody had DX8, so I would have lost most of my audience if I had used it. Nowadays, the majority of users have at least DX8.

Dual-screen support, which has been very difficult in DX6, is much easier in DX8.

The Preview Window in the Display Settings screen will also work when DX8 is used.

All monitor configurations will be available with the Microsoft framework for selecting them.

Sleep and standby functions should work normally (or at least as well as other MS screensavers).

Microsoft should be much more willing to help with code questions and testing than they were when I was using a framework which they no longer supported.

Now you gone an done it . Got my hopes up again . I'm not one to ask , how long are we going to be waiting . I haven't since day one . But boy I'm getting close to :D

This is all good what you are doing . I can't wait to see either one of the tanks .

I just hope that this will be more succesfull than the last time. Good luck!

Hi all. Are there any updates on this topic?

Jim, what about chaning to DirectX 9? Downloaded it yeasterday *g*
sorry, sounds like a lot of uncomfortable work, good luck with it.

DirectX 8 is commonplace. DirectX 9 is brand new.

Jav400 ---> Hopeing that it looks as good in 3D as I think it will.:)

You might actually try out these drivers Jim and see what you think. So far I haven't locked up or had any major problems other than having to tweak and adjust some settings to get the desired response. These aren't perfect yet by a long shot, but they are performing in 2K for me and thats a step in the right direction after a long wait.

I'll wait until they create some drivers that actually produce a watchable 3D picture with no jittering or eye reversal.

I hope I read that right. If so, I should be able to use UltraMon to run two different aquariums on two monitors, both full screen.

UltraMon is a great program BTW, highly recommened to anyone with dual screens.

I hope it comes soon this screensaver will rock keep the work up jim:D

yeah, three more fish to go!!

I can't wait.

This freshwater aquarium is going to be awesome. Let us know when we can pre-order it.

Jim,

I haven't been here for a while now, but from what i read, the aquarium will rock.
I know the question i'm going to ask now will probably not be answered with the answer i want to see, but i'm asking it anyway :D.

Is it possible to put a screenshot up with the treasure chest or the background maybe????

If not, no problem, we just have to wait a bit longer.
Any ideas how much longer we will have to wait??

Jim, when do you think you can start working on freshwater aquarium again? Could you restore all your programs you need to work?

The snapshot of the *actual* tank Jim posted a few pages ago is an fairly accurate portrayal of how the Freshwater tank will look. Specifically the treasure chest.

memilm -

I'm not working on the Freshwater Aquarium or anything else at the moment. I'm about to chuck the whole computer out the window. Viruses corrupted some system files, which caused me to re-install XP, and then the problems REALLY started.

Here are just a FEW of the problems:

Though all of my original programs were still there, the new Windows wouldn't recognize them because it didn't consider them "installed". So I began re-installing the ones I still had disks for, but then they need the years of updates that can only be downloaded from the Internet. At 56k, this is days of online time (even if the computer would go that long without rebooting).

The sound card won't work.

Windows recognizes that a printer is connected, and asks for the drivers. When the drivers are installed, it adds another printer to the system, but none of them actually work.

The system shuts down for various reasons with cryptic messages, like "System shutdown caused by NT Authority System".

None of the associations work. For example, when I click on a .dsw file, instead of starting Visual C++, I get a "Not a Win32 application" message. Using "Open with..." does not work.

Viruses are still lurking. Yesterday I found the DLLHOST/SVCHOST worm, and eradicated it. That's an easy one, but who knows what's still in there?

Windows has forgotton all my passwords, and so have I.

Morgan has offered to come out here and try to get the machine back into shape, but he only knows about a few of the issues, which are truly overwhelming. What I've listed here represents maybe 10% of the problems.

So, right now I'm going downstairs and lay some floor tile. I know how to do that.

Oh no, I hate stuff like that. You can get crazy with such work :( just do it as quick as possible and then get back to the tank.

Jim, - What can I say? ...... I can only commiserate!