I get often asked what tools I am using for my did my ASCII and ANSI Text art. Back to ASCII Art Academy I used first a tool called ANSIDraw which was a piece of junk. The maximum number of lines per ASCII or ANSI the program was able to support was 23 (which is exactly 2 lines less than a page in DOS. Anything above 23 lines triggered a “pause”, if “page breaks” were not disabled.) It was unable to load ANSIs which meant, that you had to get the colors right the first time or you had to load the ANSI as ASCII (without colors) and start colorizing from scratch … argh. You can download Ansidraw at my download page like all the other Tools I am mentioning in this post and experience the pain yourself, it’s only 20 KB in size. I got over this pain fairly quick when TheDaw entered my world. This was a really advanced ANSI Editor compared to anything else that was out there. TheDraw is the Editor I am using to this date. It runs without problems under Windows. Others preferred the very similar tool which came out a bit later than TheDraw called ACiDDraw, which was developed by the legendary ANSI Art Group ACiD (which stands for ANSi Creators In Demand). The only feature worth mentioning which sets ACiDDraw apart from TheDraw is the fact that TheDraw is restricted to maximum 100 Lines for a single ANSI File and ACiDDraw had[…]
I made the final touches on the site today. Everything related to ASCII and ANSI Text art is now moved to its new home. In addition to the move were several design changes made and more content was added as well. Existing content was updated and in some cases cconsiderably extended.I am proud to announce today the official Re-Launch of RoySAC.com.The new site is completely dedicated to oldskool BBS and underground ASCII and ANSI art. Online galleries with hundreds of art pieces, articles, ascii tutorial, ascii editor and viewer downloads, related DVDs and books and background information.I submit the news about the Re-Launch to Digg.com. If you like the Site and have a Digg.com account, go to the entry about the launch at digg and digg the news story.Parallel did I launch an AdCast Campaign at deviantART.com. An Ad that promotes the new Site will be displayed 1,250,000 times across the deviantART Website during the next week.If you have any comments or suggestion for the new site, let me know. I am open to any suggestions. Is there anything that is missing that you would like to see on the site in the future?Thank you for your interest in oldskool ASCII and ANSI Text artI appreciate thatCheers,Carsten aka Roy/SAC
It wasn’t the first time that somebody said to me, that one of my “ASCIIs” is labeled wrong as such and should be labeled “ANSI”.He was referring to what is also called a “Block ASCII”. He is right and wrong with his comment and I will try to explain that.The Extended IBM Code Pages (Code page 437 in the US and 850 in Germany) are part of the 8-Bit DOS character set and a proprietary (ANSI) standard by IBM.The Extended Code pages include several special Graphical Characters that go beyond the 7-bit US-Character set of 128 characters supported by any other Operating System on the PC and Mainframe including MAC, Unix and Linux.Those special Characters are considered ASCII by most people that owned and used a PC (especially the PC Demo, Underground Art and Warez Scenes). It was referred to them as “High ASCII” or “Block ASCII” although they are technically not ASCII. Only the 128 characters that are part of the 7-bit US-Character set are truly ASCII.ANSIs on the other hand were called documents (are called) that used special Escape Sequences for color coding and other features.These documents require the ANSI.sys driver being loaded in order to view the document correctly. ANSI.sys was not required to display “plain” “High ASCII” characters.Because of that and the stupid name Microsoft gave the driver to display .ANS files (ANSI.sys), did Tens of thousand (if not more) of people on the IBM PC and compatible classify ASCII and ANSI the way they did[…]
It has been a while since I posted at my Text Art Blog about something that is actually Text Art related. To everybody who does not care about this topic, sorry, the recent events in Internet Marketing (CJ, Google etc.) had to get my almost complete attention and did along the way pretty much managed to hijack my blog. Update: I had to refine my statement and did so in this post, Please read it as well to avoid any misunderstandings regarding the use of my art work. The transformation happened slowly but steadily during the last 2-3 months. No, it is not my intent to convert the blog! Okay, now am I really getting to the Text Art news which I did promise. I made an important decision last weekend. I decided to release all my ANSI and ASCII Text Art, as well as “scene” related pixel art into the public domain. Yes, you heard right, I did give up the copyright, which I did own, on my art pieces. Most Text Artists or “scene” artists in general I know don’t care much about their copyright and have no problem with the fact that their stuff gets copied over and over again. Most are even happy about that, because it proves that they are respected as artists and that people like their stuff. The problem is, that this good intentional attitude does not change existing copyright laws. If you don’t specify somewhere the copyright status of your art piece,[…]
After some time re-configuring and re-installing PHP on our Windows 2003 Web Server did I finally managed to get the AnsiLove Script to work again. All Text Art Galleries are now up and running again and ready to be checked out by anybody who is curious about this unique type of art. There are still some minor issues I have to solve, but they are not affecting the Cumbrowski.com domain, nor the ConsumerMatch.com Shopping Portal.I am still not 100% certain, what the problem caused in the first place. I have some ideas, which I have to check a bit more. This little issues was just another one in a long chain of issues that pop-up out of nowhere recently which throws me a bit off with time lines for my planned projects. It is getting close to my vacation. I will be gone for 15 business days. I will leave during the next 2-3 weeks. The exact date is not set yet because a friend organizes free flights to Greece for me and another friend. This means, that I will take of in a matter of less than 24 hours. The Trip and the Time frame was already planned since last October. It will be the long overdue time off to get some sleep and all the work, personal and Immigration related issues out of my head to actually spend some time simply enjoying myself, a good time with friends among friendly people, good food, good music and a lot[…]
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