Savoury was a screensaver designed for RISC OS.  It was tested on various versions, ran on versions 3.10 and above, and used just 32KB of RAM when idle.

Its purpose was to allow you to convert your own small BASIC programs (with whatever amazing effects you created) into fully working screensavers.  In the 90s there was a popular magazine called Acorn User, and inside this were code snippets.  Many of these snippets were designed as ‘demos’ — they produced interesting effects on the screen, but largely did not have a purpose, apart from to look very impressive and for something to show your friends.

Savoury put all those cool BASIC programs to use, by converting them into proper screensavers; even with co-operative multi-tasking.  It worked with most BASIC programs, and was designed to insert its own code into loops, but with the absolute minimum of slowdown.  All you had to do was ‘drag and drop’ your BASIC program into Savoury’s main window, and wait a few seconds for the conversion process.

I was surprised to find that Savoury stills work on RISC OS 4, so it probably also works with RISC OS 5 and above.  I haven’t tested it on a Raspberry Pi (or many other recent ARM CPUs) yet.

Savoury is packed into a self-extracting archive.  Set the type to &FF8 and run the file.

It was all quite self-explanatory; the extra ‘Min. Mem’ function was simply to allow you to allocate more memory to the running screensavers (in case you found they needed it).

A screensaver folder was provided to allow you to easily run, rename, or delete screensaver modules:

You could pick the screensaver that was due to be triggered next (random by default):

Savoury could either be shown in the icon bar (on the left-hand system side) or in a small unobtrusive window sitting on the desktop background: