ANSI to infinity and beyond!

August 29, 2013 6:36 PM

Text-art collective Blocktronics released it's 3rd pack last night called "Space Invaders" with over 100 pieces of text-based ANSI/ASCII art
posted by livejamie (10 comments total)

I always thought it was interesting how ASCii (jeah) art never used the full 8 bit character set, while ANSi (bro) almost entirely depended on it. And then there was 7-bit ASCii-characters-with-ANSi-color art which was its own thing. And it never caught on to promote the 7-bit aspect of proper ASCii art in the way "8-bit anything" is glorified today. NAU IS TEH TIME

K-raD
posted by lordaych at 7:15 PM on August 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Wasn't quite a bit of ascii art made for Amiga, which I don't think have the block characters? Amiga art would also use slashes and backslashes in a different way because of the different font on the Amiga.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 7:27 PM on August 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sounds right, and it also goes back to typewriter pr0n and their limited character set is of course quitr limited. But the aesthetic continued well into the 90s and beyond in the art scene. I made one of those horrid GIF2ASCII (not animated) generators and was proud of my Trent Reznor pic that no one else could recognize... I remember the first time my dad and I tinkered with THEDRAW expecting it to be a GUI paint program before we knew about ASCii and ANSi art. It was LIKE "UHHH, WHAT DO PEOPLE SEE IN YOU?" I liked ACIDDRAW but had no skills. Didn't stop me from making sweet BBS menus and logos though
posted by lordaych at 7:52 PM on August 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

my dad and I tinkered with THEDRAW

I was just thinking about TheDraw the other day when I came across RexPaint, which seems like a bit of a spiritual successor. No animation, though.
posted by neckro23 at 1:20 AM on August 30, 2013

Mefi's own Jason Scott covered the Ascii/ANSI art scene pretty extensively as part of his extremely well done BBS: The Documentary (previously and previouslier)

Artscene
posted by namewithoutwords at 4:46 AM on August 30, 2013

They are lamers.
posted by crank at 6:29 AM on August 30, 2013

These are great. It feels a bit like cheating to post them as images, but I guess that's a necessary practicality. There's a lot more color here than I remember from the ANSI days, are they cheating?

It's interesting to me that the ones I've seen don't use much (if any) subpixel rendering. Ie: it's not the shape of the character that matters, just the weight of it. For that matter most of these are drawn entirely with block characters.

how ASCii (jeah) art never used the full 8 bit character set, while ANSi (bro) almost entirely depended on it.

ASCII itself is a 7 bit character set. My impression is original ASCII art was from a pre-ANSI day, on Commodores and Ataris and Apples and Unix line printers. To be portable you're stuck to the 7 bits. And certainly no color codes! ANSI moves you specifically into DOS-only territory. Although I imagine the Amiga kids had their own cool thing, no doubt lovingly documented somewhere.
posted by Nelson at 7:00 AM on August 30, 2013

@Nelson Some of the pieces are "Xbins" which are .xb files in which you can modify the color palette (and width) but for the .ans files people are just being really creative
posted by livejamie at 9:26 AM on August 30, 2013

so how do I get these to display correctly in my linux terminal?
posted by gryftir at 12:55 AM on August 31, 2013

Every pack these folks release makes the world better.
posted by jscott at 11:35 PM on September 5, 2013