---
name: "Lunacy"
subtitle: "A native player that runs the original Lunatic Fringe module, unchanged, on a modern Mac"
date: 2026-07-14
category: play
topics: [macos-apps, history-and-archives]
tags: [game, screensaver, retro, free, macos, emulation, preservation]
link: "https://morphing.cloud/lunacy/"
linkText: "morphing.cloud"
description: "A free native Swift app that hosts an emulation core and plays Lunatic Fringe — the interactive After Dark screensaver module from 1991 — unmodified on macOS 13+. It is the player, not the game: you supply the module."
source: "Daring Fireball — Linked List"
fromFind: "lunacy"
---

> Lunacy plays *Lunatic Fringe* — the After Dark screensaver module that was secretly a space shooter — on a modern Mac, by running the original 1991 code rather than rewriting it. It is the player, not the game: Berkeley Systems still owns the module, so you have to bring your own copy.

![Lunatic Fringe running in Lunacy: the player's ship in a starfield, radar at the corners, enemy craft closing in.](./hero.png)

*The original module, unmodified, rendered by a Swift app on Apple silicon.*

In 1991, Berkeley Systems shipped *More After Dark*, an expansion pack for the screensaver that everyone remembers for its flying toasters. One of the modules in it, written by Ben Haller, was not a screensaver at all. *Lunatic Fringe* looked like an idle animation of ships drifting through a starfield — until you toggled caps lock, at which point you took the controls and it became a single-player space combat game: Asteroids by way of *Maelstrom*, with a radar, power-ups, and a high-score chase. The detail that makes it more than a novelty is its damage model. Take hits and your weapons, radar, engines, and turn jets degrade individually and eventually stop working altogether; break off the fight and the ship slowly repairs itself, as long as it still has parts to spend. That is a real game, hidden inside the utility category that screensavers briefly were.

Lunacy is a native Swift app that plays it. The distinction that matters — and the find's central claim, which holds up — is that this is **not a reimplementation**. Lunacy embeds an emulation engine and executes the module's original 68k code, unchanged, presenting it in a native macOS window. Nothing has been ported, redrawn, or reverse-engineered into new source: the thing on screen is the 1991 binary, driven by a modern host. This is the same approach as its sibling Afterglow, which runs original After Dark modules on the Musashi 68k CPU emulator. You are not running a lookalike, and you are also not running a whole emulated Macintosh — the game is emulated, the app around it isn't.

It is also not the first attempt. Greg Parker's Fringe Player did this job through the PowerPC and early Intel years, and its 2007 release stopped at Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard; it has been dead on Apple's platforms for a long time. Lunacy is the successor, and it arrives with more than parity: full-screen mode, customizable keybindings, an optional CRT shader (confirmed — Gruber singles it out), and an optional global high-score leaderboard that the project's own page describes as "over-engineered (but optional) [...] for no good reason." Version 1.1.1 is a free direct download, a universal binary of about 3.8 MB, requiring **macOS 13 Ventura or later**. There is no App Store listing and no payment.

The honest catch is the one the site leads with, and it is a legal constraint rather than a technical one. *Lunatic Fringe* is copyright 1991–1993 Berkeley Systems and cannot be redistributed. Lunacy ships **no game data whatsoever** — you must supply your own copy of the module, which shipped in *More After Dark* and *After Dark Deluxe*, and drag it onto the app at first launch. If you don't have a 30-year-old install disc in a drawer, sourcing that file is your problem and the project pointedly does not solve it. Two further caveats: the app is closed-source for now (the site's GitHub link reads "coming soon," and no repository exists yet), and it is very young — 1.1.1, one developer, no public issue tracker, no support channel.

One clarification, because the names are almost cruelly similar: *Lunatic Fringe* was written by Ben **Haller**. Lunacy is the work of Jeff **Halter**, a different person entirely, and the more interesting fact about him is that this is not a one-off. Under morphing.cloud he is running a systematic salvage operation on dead Mac software: [Stacks](/find/stacks-hypercard/), a HyperCard player for modern macOS and the web, which this site captured three days ago; Afterglow, which promises 125+ original After Dark modules spanning releases 1.0 through 4.0; a web port of Cliff Johnson's *The Fool and His Money*; and Mobius, an actively maintained Hotline server written in Go. His Mastodon bio — "Drunk on 90's computing nostalgia, hacking on After Dark, HyperCard, and Hotline" — is an accurate job description. Lunacy is worth ten minutes on its own. As one exhibit in a person's ongoing project to make an entire lost software era executable again, rather than merely screenshotted, it's worth rather more.
