Using tools like Image to Text converters is against the ethics of any serious text artist, but they became pretty popular (and also more sophisticated) after ANSI and ASCII art almost faded away into the darkness of forgotten history. This popularity today is also the reason, why I mention them here, because regardless if I like it or not, they have their place in ANSI and ASCII art history. Even though the converter tools became more sophisticated and can produce good to excellent results today, is their use among serious text artists against the ethics and rules as it was during the prime of computer text art. Because of its popularity I decided to add the tools that I am reviewing here also to my ASCII Art Academy, where you can learn how to create real ASCII and ANSI art and also more about the history and origin of this unique niche form of computer art. You can use the converters for fun and the sake of it, but never try to sell off any piece of text art as your own creation, if you used a converter even for only some parts of your image, or state where you used a converter and how you improved on the results or altered them. It will diminish the respect that you will get from fellow artists, but it is honest and honesty is still of high value. The piece of art created this way, is may be able to stand on[…]
I added a significant amount of content to my ASCII Art Academy page on my site. I answered there in short what things are. I explain all this stuff in detail in various articles, but I think it is good to have a short and straight forward version on the main Academy home page as well. Here are some examples:What is ASCII Art?ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a text format standard for computers. ASCII art is text art that was created on computers who use this ASCII standard. The text art created on the IBM PC, which use text characters beyond the ASCII standard are also called ASCII, even though it is technically incorrect. The IBM PC become the most widely used computer in the world and people called things ASCII, even if they were not. There is no sense to debate about it, because it won’t change what already happened. What is 7-Bit ASCII?The difference between 7-bit and 8-bit ASCII is pretty simple, assuming that you have a keyboard with the latin alphabet. 7-bit only uses characters that you can find on the keyboard. 8-bit uses additional characters that you cannot find on your keyboard, but which exist in “text mode” of the old MS DOS operating system. MS DOS hat 256 characters for text mode. Some of them are control characters and not visible, such as Carriage Return, Line Feed (Line Break), the Tab character or the Escape character. The standard US-ASCII[…]
When I released my artwork on July 6, 2006 into the public domain, I assumed that this automatically implies that copies and derivations of it can also not be copyrighted. I just learned recently that this is not the case. Since this was not intended by my original declaration, I did modify my declaration and the disclaimer in all detail pages of my artwork that became property of the general public. I am not a lawyer, so I assume that this refinement of my declaration will be okay. I also assume that this updated declaration cannot apply to events that happened between July 6, 2006 and today, August 24, 2008. With this change did also the logo change. Instead of the strikethrough “c” logo is not the flipped “c” logo displayed with the license. What now follows is the old and new disclaimer to illustrate what changed. Old DisclaimerThis piece of Art has been released into the public domain.You are free to use it for your purposes free of charge. See Disclaimer below. This image has been (or is hereby) released into the public domainby its author, Roy/SAC aka Carsten Cumbrowski. This applies worldwide. In some countries this is not legally possible; if so:Roy/SAC aka Carsten Cumbrowski grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose,without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law. Updated/New DisclaimerThis piece of Art has been released into the public domain under the Free Art Licence (FAL) 1.3 (Copyleft Attitude). See Disclaimer[…]
I am sorry for all the dead videos at my blog at the moment, but as I mentioned in my last post, my primary YouTube account is currently in status “suspended”. I tried to contact YouTube several times via email and fax (yeah, that machine that sends paper over the phone wires). I also tried to call them, but if you do not know the extension of the person you want to reach then you got stuck in an automated computer menu jungle or the system hangs up on you. I complained about this horrible support at one of the business blogs I write for and home that I will hear something from YouTube within this year or so. I have not given up my account yet. I probably lost the hundreds of subscribers, but I hope for YouTube that my 160+ videos are still okay. I still have my other YouTube account with the user name “sacreleases” where I upload demos, intros and cracktro videos recordings and ANSI animations or ASCIImations. That account has over 200 videos available for watching. In the case that you did not notice, but I made the first 199 videos accessible from the RoySAC.com homepage via a YouTube JavaScript widget. One Video that I uploaded last night was the ANSI animation by Jed and Tracer of ACiD Productions for the BBS “The Bog” from around 1992. I added audio to it, just for the fun of it and to support the visual images. I[…]
Good news! I extended the ASCII Art Academy with several new tutorials.Only one of the new tutorials is for 7-bit ASCII, but hey, there I had already seven to begin with. The additional tutorial was created by “Cain” and it demonstrates how to draw a cool 7-bit newskool ASCII Logo.The most important additions are the SIX ANSI art tutorials, because I didn’t had any ANSI tutorials before and was constantly looking for some.I found the tutorials in an unexpected place. They were originally published at the Acheron ANSI, ASCII and RIP art forums and portal at Acheron.org. Archeron was discontinued in 2004 and is now part of the Sixteencolors.net site, specificallly the Sixteencolors.net Wiki.I found a backup of the whole site on the “Dark Domain DVD” by RaD Man/ACiD, which is actually an archive for ANSI/ASCII art packs and not a web archive per se. Well, thanks to Chris (RaD Man) and his collectors instinct, was I able to republish the ANSI art tutorials on the Internet again.The Dark Domain DVD is available in my little “online shop” by the way and a must buy for all ANSI and ASCII art fans out there. Buy the DVD and stop collecting anything that was released before 2005, because the DVD has all of them in one small and handy package for an affordable price.Now I need to find tutorials for 8-Bit block ASCII. I don’t have anything for that style available at my academy yet. I will continue looking for any[…]
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