Johnny Castaway Picture Frame

How to build a nice Wood Picture Frame with the Retro Screensaver Johnny Castaway powered by an Raspberry Pi

Johnny Castaway is a classic Screen Saver which got very famous back in the Windows 3.1 Days in the 90s. In this Tutorial, we gonna bring it back to Screen behind a nice Wood Frame.

In general these Kind of Screensavers do no longer run on any modern Platform out of the Box – There are some Projects around, which try to create Ports or rebuild the Screensaver, but there is nothing close final and bug-free to the original Screensaver. The Idea of this Project is, to run it as Emulation in a Picture Frame which you can place anywhere. 

So here we go. 

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Requirements

Display and Frame Build

In this Tutorial an “Eviciv” IPS 7″ Display with 178 degree View Port was used, purchased from Amazon. The Display does have a nice Connection / Housing for the Pi 3 and Pi4 built-in. 

The Wood Frame is from Walther Design (Model “Duplo”)*, also purchased from Amazon. The Frame was cut at the outside to remove the outer wooden beams. The wooden beams were removed carefully from the base plate and cut to fit into the inner Frame Part – So the wooden beams cover the black Frame of the Display.

The Display was mounted with the hinges of the Frame on the Backside. The “Walther Frame” Pedestal was removed and cut to fit / extend the Display Pedestal. I used Tesa Powerstrips* for bonding.

OS Installation

In this Tutorial, I used the latest Lite 64Bit Image of Raspberry PI OS (bullseye) – Anyway this Tutorial will also work on 32 Bit. 

Get the Raspberry PI OS Lite Image from here: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

Flash the OS onto you SD Card – I used Balena Etcher to do so.

Now it’s Time to do the Software Installation / Configuration. Put the SD Card into your Raspberry and fire it up. 

System Configuration

Login to your Raspberry – Username: “pi” and Password: “raspberry”. We’ll do some basic Configurations now: 

sudo raspi-config

Timezone and Keyboard Configuration

Go to Menu “5 Localisation”, Submenu

  • “L1 Locale” and set at least your default locale
  • “L2 Timezone” and configure your Timezone
  • “L3 Keyboard” and configure your Keyboard Layout

Exit “rasps-config” and check your “locale” Settings

sudo nano -w /etc/default/locale

Your file should look like:

File generated by update-locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

If the last 3 lines are missing, add and customise them depending on your “LANG=” Setting. 

Reboot your Pi now!

Network Configuration

sudo raspi-config

Go to Menu “1 System Options”, Submenu 

  • “S1 Wireless LAN” and configure your Wifi
  • “S4 Hostname” and setup a nice Name for your Frame

Exit the Setup and reboot if asked the Pi now. Also you can reboot with:

sudo reboot

Login to your Pi and test if your Internet Connection is working. 

ping www.google.de

Optional: I recommend to activate SSH to continue remote with the Setup, you can enable it by typing

sudo systemctl enable ssh
sudo systemctl start ssh

Software Installation

We’ll update our System first:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Time synchronisation

It’s always a good idea to keep Date and Time in sync – We install “Chrony” to do so:

sudo apt install chrony
sudo systemctl enable chrony
sudo systemctl start chrony

Check if date and Time is correct:

date

Xfce Desktop Installation

My favourite Desktop is Xfce, anyway you can install a different Desktop if you like. 

sudo apt install xfce4

Time to get a cup of coffee – This is exactly how long the Xfce Installation will take 😉 . 

Dosbox Installation

Dosbox is necessary to emulate Dos/Windows 3.1 for Johnny Castaway. Let’s install it:

sudo apt install dosbox

Johnny Castaway Installation

There are Information on how to get Johnny Castaway in a ZIP File containing all necessary Components on Johnny-Castaway.com – Thanks to the unknown creator – you should find it at: 

https://johnny-castaway.com/download.html

Download the ZIP File to your raspberry or copy it over to “/home/pi” vis SCP. Go to the Directory containing the ZIP and unzip it:

cd /home/pi
unzip DOSBOX_JC.zip

Bringing Johnny Castaway back to Screen

We’ll now configure the Pi to boot into the Desktop automatically:

sudo raspi-config

Go to Menu “1 System Options” 

  • “S5 Boot / Auto Login” and select “B4 Desktop Autologin”

Now reboot the Pi – It should automatically start the Xfce Desktop.

DOSBox Configuration

On your Desktop Start DOSBox once From the Xfce Menu “Games>DOSBox Emulator” you can quit it afterwards by typing “exit” into the DOSBox Command Window.

Now a config file was created for DOSbox which we will edit now. Please note the “Version” might be different for the Filename in future depending on your Installation-Date and DOSBox Release. 

nano -w /home/pi/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74-3.conf

Change the Parameter to “true” to enable Fullscreen at the Beginning of the Config

fullscreen=true

Add the following new lines to the end of the Config to mount the Johnny Castaway Files as drive C and to launch the Screensaver:

MOUNT C /home/pi/DOSBox_JC
C:
autoexec.bat

Finally we edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to start Johnny Castaway automatically and exit Dosbox if a key is pressed.

nano -w /home/pi/DOSBox_JC/AUTOEXEC.BAT

Add these lines to the End of the File:

cd windows
win runexit c:\windows\scrantic.exe /s
exit

Start DOSBox and check if the Screensaver does run in Fullscreen.

Optional: Desktop Cosmetics

At this Point – I changed the Wallpaper to black, removed unnecessary Docks and Items from the Desktop to make it look clean when the Frame starts.

Autostarting

We create a “.desktop” File which will be automatically executed by Xfce. This will start our DOSBox Emulation with the Settings we did before.

Create a Folder for Xfce Autostart Items

mkdir /home/pi/.config/autostart

Now we will create and edit the Autostart File for DOSBox:

nano -w /home/pi/.config/autostart/dosbox.desktop

Add the following Content:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=dosbox
Exec=dosbox

Make the File executable: 

chmod +x /home/pi/.config/autostart/dosbox.desktop

Shutdown

Let’s place an “.desktop” File on our Desktop. When you do have a Touchscreen and touch anywhere, DOSbox will quit due to the configuration we did before. You’ll now see your Desktop – So why not create a Desktop Link to shutdown your System? – Here we go.

Create and edit a File with Nano from the Terminal:

nano -w /home/pi/Desktop/shutdown.desktop

Add the following Content to the File:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Name=Shutdown
Exec=xfce4-session-logout --halt
Icon=system-shutdown

Make the File executeable:

chmod +x /home/pi/Desktop/shutdown.desktop

You should now see a Shutdown Link on your Xfce Desktop.

At this Point our Setup is complete – Fire up the Pi and enjoy your interactive Picture Frame.

Optional Software and Configuration

VNC for current Session

It may be useful to remote Access the Xfce Session to do additional Configurations. Install and run VNC with the following Parameters:

sudo apt-get install x11vnc
x11vnc -display :0 -usepw -shared

Enter a Password and let it store to “/home/pi/.vnc/passwd” – VNC will run interactive now – You can stop it with [CTRL]+[C].

If you like to have VNC automatically started – Add it to your XFce Startup Objects

nano -w /home/pi/.config/autostart/vnc.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=vnc
Comment=start vnc server for current user session
Exec=bash -c 'x11vnc -display :0 -usepw -shared;$SHELL'
Icon=utilities-terminal
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;
chmod +x /home/pi/.config/autostart/vnc.desktop

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