I sometimes get reports about Ansilove rendering some artworks differently than other ANSI art editors and viewers for modern platforms. Ansilove tries to be faithful to ANSI.SYS and MS-DOS based editors and viewers rendering, as the vast majority of artworks were created during the DOS era. Most of the time, using ACiDDraw and ACiD View in DOSBox is enough, but when in doubt, it can be useful to verify how ANSI....
After doing my series on Taiwanese BBSes (first part, second part), I also took some screenshots from two Chinese BBS systems, but only found those files again recently. Those screens were captured in March 2013 and cover Lilac and NewSMTH systems. While I could not find much English information about Lilac, which seems to be located in Hong Kong, there is a Wikipedia page about SMTH which appears to have had a complicated history....
This is the second part of the Taiwanese BBSes series. In this one, we will be covering the PTT3 system, which was down at the time I published the first part. Hopefully it was only temporary and as promised, here is another round of screenshots. Although this system is not as rich graphically as PTT and PTT2, there was still some interesting screens to capture. For the record, PTT3 is aimed at Taiwanese students studying abroad, which explains why the login screen features a world map....
Ever since I discovered Unicode based ANSi art and the existence of Taiwanese telnet BBSes making heavy use of it (in fact, PTT uses Big-5 encoding), I wanted to learn more and explore this different and exotic textmode world. As these BBSes are in Chinese language it was not that easy to figure out how to create an account, but using some logic and a bit of patience, I was able to log in and take some screenshots....
I’ve been printing some ANSi art lately, and figured out I would post something about it. All pieces have been printed at a digital photo printing kiosk using 4R format (which translate into a size of 4" × 6" or 102 × 152 mm and a 3:2) ratio. I had to make two batches in order to get the desired results: For the first batch, I just printed the 16 colors PNG output from Ansilove to see how it would look like, and I can tell you it didn’t turn out very well: the aspect ratio was not preserved (which I expected) and the printed material had dull colors....
I’ve just released AnsiGo, a simple ANSi to PNG converter written in pure Go: it simply takes an ANSi file as input and converts it to PNG. No external dependencies are required (the font data is embedded) and AnsiGo compiles into a single binary file. At the moment you will have to compile it yourself, but I hope to provide binary versions and a Windows executable in the future. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AnsiGo 1....
This is an attempt at building a text mode Web browser interface. It has built in tabs, back and forward buttons, an home button, an address bar with favicon display, bookmark icon, and country flag. It also comes with a few default extensions: a pagerank plugin, a currency converter, a weather plugin, and a music player as well. What else could you ask for? The possibilities are infinite. By the way, in case you wonder if such a browser makes sense in the social media era, the answer is YES: you can of course share the pages on various social media sites....
I’m pleased to announce the release of my minimalist ANSi and ASCii based themes for Chrome and Chromium. I kept everything simple on purpose, as the default theme is very clean, nice, and efficient: these two themes just aim to give a discreet text mode feeling to everyday life browsing, nothing more, nothing less. The color differences from the original theme can be seen in the status and download bars as well as in the detached bookmarks bar (where I used color #07 (light gray) from the ANSI / EGA palette) and in the text links where color #08 (dark gray) was used....
I’m very happy to announce the release of my ANSi Social Media Icon Set, licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and containing icons for the following services: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +1, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit. Each icon has been drawn in ANSi with a resolution of 3 lines by 6 columns: pixel equivalent would be 6x6 as even if they are only 3 lines high, I could of course take advantage of the “Upper half block” and “Lower half block” extended ASCii characters (respectively chars #223 and #220, please refer to my Ascii Table if you’re unfamiliar with the ASCii charset)....
I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about JavaScript lately, and on Node.js in particular, which is such a great project and on top of that, seems to fit all the requirements of an upcoming site I will start working on pretty soon. Meanwhile, it inspired me to draw a Node ANSI logo, which you can download as an ansi file, or converted in PNG for easier viewing. I’m also working on a small site gathering Node....