César Miquel

César Miquel

Sr. Developer @easytechgreen

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Week of the 14/03/2022 - #11
14/03/2022
  • tech
  • art

Contents

tech

  • ANSI/ASCII Art
  • Logicoma 64k demo and demoscene tools

art

  • Migra Migra self publishing conference

ANSI/ASCII Art

I took a deep dive into ANSI ASCII Art scene. Here are my notes.

Editors

If you want to have the most ‘native’ experience I would recommend you install Dosbox on your system. I have a directory in my Linux box which I map inside Dosbox to the C:\ drive using the mount command available inside Dosbox (mount c ~/Develop/MSDOS to mount my ~/Develop/MSDOS ‘hard drive’ to C:\. To edit ASCII art I use ACiDDraw. You can download a ZIP file called ADRAW125.ZIP with the MSDOS executable to the 1.25r version and documentation which you can run from Dosbox Link to ACiDDraw.

With it you can load ANSI ASCII art from 16colors which is a huge repository of ANSI ASCII art. You can download the .ans and .nfo files.

Another way to read/edit ANSI ASCII art is to use Sixteen Colors Draw ANSI Editor which is web based simple editor / reader (link to Github repo here)

A probably easier way is, if you don’t mind installing Mono on your Linux box to try PabloDraw web which is a modern ANSI ASCII viewer editor.

Another option is ansilove which is: “AnsiLove is an ANSI and ASCII art to PNG converter, allowing to convert ANSI and artscene-related file formats into PNG images, supporting ANSI (.ANS), PCBoard (.PCB), Binary (.BIN), Artworx (.ADF), iCE Draw (.IDF), Tundra (.TND) and XBin (.XB) formats.” You can find it in this Github repo

Code page 437

From Wikipedia Code page 437 article: “Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or DOS Latin US.[5] The set includes all printable ASCII characters, extended codes for accented letters (diacritics), some Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the “OEM font” or “high ASCII”, or as “extended ASCII” (one of many mutually incompatible ASCII extensions).

This is the encoding used in many files from the 16 Color archive. You can get a very rough UTF-8 version of the ANSI art by running this small Python script to convert encodings:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
import codecs, sys
try:
    infile, outfile = sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2]
except IndexError:
    sys.stderr.write('usage: %s input_file output_file\n' % sys.argv[0])
    sys.exit(1)
nfo = codecs.open(infile, encoding='cp437').read()
codecs.open(outfile, 'w', encoding='utf-8').write(nfo)

Here’s a sample ANSI ASCII Art converted to UTF-8. Keep in mind that many ANSI Art uses VGA colors which won’t get translated but for some very simple ART it might work:

                              ▄▀▀▄      ▄▄▀▀▀▀▀▀▄
                             ▓ ▄█▄▀▄  ▄▀ ▄▄████▄ ▓
                       ▄▄▄▄ ▐▌▐██ ▐▓▄▀▓▄███▀▀███▌▐▌ ▄▄▄▄
                     ▐▀ ▄▄ ▀▀▓ ▀██▄▄▄▄███▀ ▄▌▐█▀ ▓▀▀ ▄▄ ▀▀▄
                     ▓ ██████▄▄ ▄ ▀▀███▄  ▀▌▄█▄ ▄▄███████▄░▀▄
                    ▐▌▐███████▌▐ ▄████████▄ ████ ████▀▀███▓ ▐▌
                    ▓ ████ ███▓ ▓███▀▄▄▀███▌████ ███▓ ▄ ███▓ ▓
                   ▐▌▐███▌▌▐███▄███▌▐██ ▄▄▄▓▓███ ████ █▌▐███▌▐▌
                   ▓ ████▄▄▄████▐███▄▀▀▄███▌████ ████ ▀▄███▓▄▓
                  ▐▌▐███▌ ▄ ▐███▌▀███████▓▀ ████▄▄▀▀█▄████▀ █
                  ▓ ███▓ ▐█▌ ███▓ ▄ ▀▀▀▀ ░█ ▀▀▀▀▐███████▓ ▄▀ T
                  █▄▄▄▄▄▄▓█ ▀▀▀██▄ █▀▀▀▀▀ ▀▀▀▀▓▌ ███▀▀ ▄▓▀
                          ▀▀▀▓▄▄▄▄▄▓ ld!aCid   █▄▄▄▄▄▀▀
   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │     P     r     o     d     u      c     t     i     o     n     S     │
   |   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐   |
   :  :│                   ─── RELEASE INFORATION ───                  │:  :
   ┌─∙┘└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘└∙─┐
   │                 ·∙ACiD Productions(t) Proudly Presents∙·               │
   │                                                                        │
   │ Title      [ XBinCap TSR v1.1                                        ] │
   ├─────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┤
   │ Released   [ Noveber 12, 2013 P ] │ Total Bytes [ 12,769           ]   │
   ├─────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤
   │ Author     [ Tasaniac            ] │ Packaged By [ RaD an          ]   │
   ├─────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────┤
   │ Description  ┌ XBinCap TSR is a screen capturing progra which       ┐  │
   │              │ saves text ode screens, including the pallette and   │  │
   │              └ font inforation to the XBIN forat.                  ┘   │
   ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   │ Notes      [ Additional info on XBIN is available at our website.    ] │
   ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   │ GrafX Support  [ ] EGA       [ ] CGA        [■] SVGA       [ ] None    │
   ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
   │ Additional releases can be located via ACiD's Website -- www.acid.org  │
   └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

   ∙∙─────────────── Copyright ACiD Productions T 1996-2013 ──────────────∙∙

Another, even easier method is to use iconv like so:

$ curl -s -L https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-globalblockdown/raw/misfit-synapse.ans | iconv -f cp437 -t utf-8

iCE colors

When an ANSi source was created using iCE colors, it was done with a special mode where the blinking was disabled, and you had 16 background colors available. Basically, you had the same choice for background colors as for foreground colors, that’s iCE colors. But now the important part: when the ANSi source does not make specific use of iCE colors, you should NOT set this flag. The file could look pretty weird in normal mode. So in most cases it’s fine to turn iCE colors off.

16colo.rs

16colo.rs - This site hasa huge amount of ANSI / ASCII Art. This is the Github repo

Some of Art I liked in 16colo.rs:

Some ANSI artists and groups I enjoy

https://16colo.rs/pack/blndr2022a/B-LIT12A.ANS.png

https://16colo.rs/pack/blndr2022a/B-LIT12A.ANS.png

https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-18/shd-sx05.ans

Other prods from Galza

An ANSI newsletter

7bit

https://16colo.rs/pack/galza-22/us-path-ru.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/break_06/k1-nowa.asc

ANSI

https://16colo.rs/pack/blndr2022a/tnt-hiAF.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-b-sides/B-SiDES%20iNFO.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/amish-rumspringa/717-rumspringa-nfo.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-globalblockdown/us-om-x-2m-socialism.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/amish-rumspringa/fil-fracking.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics_miracle_on_67th_street/mtcf-starlord.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/fuel23/fil-Gluckwunsche.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-globalblockdown/fil-nach0.ans

Typography

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-420/N-BTFONT.ANS

💡 Generar el font de la Apple II con ANSI Art.

Other

Textmode demos

I found this awesome demo:

and there is another very nice demo which has source code:

PETSCII

Logicoma 64k demo and demoscene tools

Image 1 Image 2 Image 3 Image 4 Image 5 Image 6

Demoscene Tools

  • Rocket sync-tracker github page - Rocket is an intuitive new way of… bah, whatever. It’s a sync-tracker, a tool for synchronizing music and visuals in demoscene productions. It consists of a GUI editor (using Qt5), and an ANSI C library that can either communicate with the editor over a network socket, or play back an exported data-set.
  • Rocket 4 Unix? - GNU Rocket OpenGL editor
  • pyrocket - A rocket client written in Python.
  • BASS Audio Library - BASS is an audio library for use in software on several platforms. Its purpose is to provide developers with powerful and efficient sample, stream (MP3, MP2, MP1, OGG, WAV, AIFF, custom generated, and more via OS codecs and add-ons), MOD music (XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX), MO3 music (MP3/OGG compressed MODs), and recording functions. All in a compact DLL that won’t bloat your distribution.
  • WaveSabre GH - WaveSabre is a software synthesizer and toolchain for music for 64K intros. One of the tools used to make the demo

Migra Migra self publishing conference

4 de cada - 1 4 de cada - 2 4 de cada - 3 A-LZ

  • Slimbook - “El slimbook es una chuchería cultural. Ni libro, ni disco, ni película, es un soporte físico para cualquier contenido digital. Al adquirir un slimbook ­usted adquiere una obra personal a la vez que una pieza artística impresa en nuestro taller con tipografía móvil en máquinas de letterpress, hotstamping y láser, sobre cartones y papeles especiales que despliegan una pequeña muestra del contenido digital al que redirecciona.”

Barba de Abejas - 1 Barba de Abejas - 2 Barba de Abejas - 3 Barba de Abejas - 4 Barba de Abejas - 5