The SAC – Superior Art Creations All-Time Member List Project Update

I am trying for a while now to create an all time Superior Art Creations member list. This is unfortunately no easy task, because the information in the SAC.NFO files of the SAC Pack releases were not always as well maintained as they should have been. I don’t want to point and blame anybody, but its is pretty tough to get a clear picture of who is who and who was in when as what, with the amount of information that can be extracted from the releases of the group itself.

Here is what I came up with so for. The stuff that is high lighted with an orange background is where I would be happy, if anybody has an answer to my question or the missing information, whatever the case might be.

Also, the whole last section with “Non-Contributing Temp Members” is open for input. Listed there are names that were mentioned that they are members of SAC, but I could not find any contribution of those guys in any of the SAC art packs. Maybe they did something under the name of SAC, but nothing that found its way into an art pack. If that is the case, then I want of course give the credits where credits are due and remove that person from the “non-contributing” section.

If you know any of the folks where questions are still in the room or if you have any tip how or where I could find out more about them etc. Please let me know. The comments section of this blog post would do just fine.

I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

#	Handles / Aliases	File Prefix(es)	Country	PPE	PRG	VGA	MFX	ANS	ASC	ADM	Notes/Comments
Contributing Members (Included in Art Packs)
1	2Fast	2F	Germany						X
2	Acen	AC	Germany				X
3	Allanon	ALN	Sweden						X
4	Antibody	ANTI / AB	Denmark			X		X	X
5	Argon Factor	AR	Germany				X
6	Arlequin	ARL / AR	Argentina					X	X
7	Asphyx	ASX	France			X		X	X
8	Axess	AXS	Germany			X	X
9	Barium	B5	n/a			X		X	X
10	Bazilla	BAZ	Germany			X
11	Brane	BNE	Sweden						X
12	Cokine	COK	Sweden			X
13	Comrade	COM	Canada		X
14	Creator	CRE	Australia			X
15	Creature of Hell	COH / CH	USA			X	X	X
16	Crome	CROME / CRM	Germany				X
17	cRu / Maverick	CRU	Germany					X	X
18	Crusader	CDR	Sweden						X
19	D0n	DN	n/a						X
20	DAC	DAC	Germany				X
21	Dalezy / The Unconsciousness / Animal	DLZ / TU / AN	Germany				X
22	Dark Star / Puschel	DS / PL	Germany			X		X	X
23	Davek	DKNY	USA					X	X
24	Desolation Angel	DA	USA			X
25	Dipswitch	DIP	Germany						X
26	Don Rapello	DON	Finland						X
27	Dream Design	DD	Germany		X	X		X
28	DW0	DW0	n/a					X			What's the full name?
29	Eboy	EB	Finland			X		X	X
30	Edge	ED	USA			X
31	Ex0	EX0	Australia					X	X
32	F0st	FST / FS	France			X			X
33	Ferrex	FRX / FX	Germany		X	X		X	X
34	Flames	FLAMES	Germany			X			X
35	Fourth	4TH	n/a						X
36	Geareo	MYD	n/a						X
37	Giovanni	GIO	Germany				X
38	Grap	GP	Germany		X
39	GrymmJack	GJ	USA						X
40	GTI	GTI	Canada			X		X	X
41	Helix	HLX	USA						X
42	Hetero	HT	Germany		X	X		X	X
43	HKultra	HKU	n/a			X
44	IxLover Buddha	IX	n/a			X			X
45	[K]	K	Germany		X	X
46	Kaethe	KT	Germany					X	X
47	Kenet	K	France			X
48	KMX	KMX	Poland		X						What does KMX stand for?
49	Maktone	MT / M1	Sweden				X
50	Markgoh	MG	Canada						X
51	Marky	MY / M	Germany			X			X
52	Matador	MTD	Russia		X				X
53	Mattey	MATTEY	n/a			X
54	McBarn	MB	Sweden				X
55	Midfit	MF	Germany		X
56	Moolok	MOO	Germany			X		X
57	Mr.Death	MRDEATH / MRD	Sweden				X
58	Mr.Jezus	MRJEZUS	Finland			X
59	Mydknight	MID	Canada						X
60	Myth	MYTH	Germany		X
61	Neophyte	NP	Germany		X
62	Nerv	NERV / NR	France			X		X	X
63	Nova	N	Australia			X
64	Pasha	P	Germany			X			X
65	PDZ	PDZ	n/a						X		PDZ = Podzi?
66	Poldi	PD	Germany			X		X	X
67	Quasar	QS	Sweden						X
68	Rainer	RN	Germany				X
69	Raiser	RS	Germany					X	X
70	Rave	RV	Germany			X		X	X
71	Rez	REZ	Netherlands		X		X				Is Rez an abbreviation?
72	Roodolph	ROO	Poland						X
73	Roy	ROY	Germany/USA	X	X	X		X	X
74	RZ	RZ	n/a						X		RZ = Rahzel? Uses }8]a or }8] as sig in pics
75	S!	S!	n/a						X		S! = Stylez or S! = Serges or somebody else?
76	Scour	SCR	USA						X
77	Senser	SNS	France			X		X	X
78	Sergeon Cuts	SERGEON	USA			X
79	Stonehedge	SH	Germany				X
80	Shaq	SQ	Russia						X
81	Shot	ST	Germany					X
82	Silent	SiL	n/a			X
83	sOul	SOUL	Germany				X
84	Spectrum	SPC	Germany		X
85	Spoon	SPN	Germany				X
86	Sprocket	SPROCKET	Norway			X
87	Squizzy	SQZ	Netherlands						X
88	Strike Light	SL	Canada					X	X
89	Svenzzon	SVENZZON / SVEN / SV	n/a				X		X
90	Synec	SY	Germany		X
91	Techbit	TB	Canada			X
92	Teepak	TPK	Germany			X		X	X
93	Toxic Trancer	TOX	Germany				X
94	v0uck	VK	n/a						X
95	W.O.T.W.	WOTW	Germany				X
96	Webpige0	W0	n/a			X		X	X
SAC PPE Coders (Had no file prefix)
97	Cyz		Germany	X
98	Monster		Germany	X
99	Fox		Germany	X
100	Cyber Brain		Germany	X
Administrative Members
Internet Coordinators, except for Idiana who did Group Management and Organization
101	Hoziris		Israel							X
102	Cercyon		Germany							X
103	Corex		Germany							X
104	Idiana		Germany							X
Guest Contributors
Included in one or more SAC Pack releases, but never had status of SAC member
n/a	Z80	Z80	Germany		1
Non Contributing Temp Members
This list may includes members where I could not match them up confidentially with a file prefix from the pack.
It could also be that one person is listed with multiple nick names or real name.
If you know of any contributions to the group and it to the comments please.
	Ripper		Germany
	Prosthesis		Finland
	Paledeth		Sweden
	White Zombie	TWZ	Denmark
	Darkheart		Sweden
	Felix		Germany
	Timelord		Italy
	Necrotoad		Canada
	Nitrifik		Sweden
	Spinsane	SP	n/a
	Xeek	XK	n/a
	PODZI		n/a								Podzi = PDZ
	Stylez		Germany								Styles = S!?
	Serges		n/a								Serges = S!?
	Sick Doctor		n/a								Serges = Sick Doctor?
	Rahzel		n/a								Rahzel = RZ?
	Shady		Germany								Shady = S!?

Explanation of Columns
PPE = PCBoard BBS Tools Programmer (using PPL-PCBoard Programming Language, which are compiled to PPE’s)
PRG = Programmer/Coder of Intros, tools etc. such as the SACtros for SAC artpack releases.
VGA = Pixel Art Graphician and later also hi-res art via Photoshop etc.
MFX = Musician, mainly old-school tracker MOD modules (or FastTracker, ScreamTracker etc.)
ANS = ANSI text artist (like the image below)
ASC = ASCII text artist, 7-Bit and/or “high ASCII” (Block ASCII)
ADM = Administrative work, Internet Coordinator, Bot-Master (IRC) and those sorts of things)

I am feeling that we come slowly but surely closer to the goal of having a complete and correct all-time Superior Art Creations member list that I can post on the SAC section of the site as I promised to do so already two or some more years ago.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Jason Scott from Textfiles.com Text-urized

I wrote a while back already a post about the online Image to Text (ASCII) converter tool at Photo2Text.com.

Back then I used Matt Cutts from Google as my Guinea-Pig to illustrate it’s capabilities. This is not the purpose of this blog post though. Shortly after I did my post, I played around with it a bit more. I experimented with a photograph of Jason Scott Sadofsky from Textfiles.com (who also did the DVD documentary “BBS – The Documentary”, which I highly recommend, if you are interested in the subject of Bulletin Board Systems)

I tweaked the source photo of him to get better results and saved them on my hard drive and then forgot about them until now. I stumbled across them by accident and thought that I should not hide them, or at least make them accessible for Jason himself.

I took the results from the converter and tweaked them a bit more in Photoshop, adding some color and stuff like that. You can see below the stages of my changes. Click on the thumbnail images for the larger original sized version of it.

Original 7-Bit ASCII as Image.  Download the original text ASCII file	Colors added	Final picture with background added and name tag

This is the final piece and I hope that Jason (and you too) will like it.

I also created an ANSI version of the photograph with the tool. It is only using the number characters 0-9, but a very small font. The result is good, but it looks to little like an ASCII to me, because of the font size.

This ANSI was actually created as a HTML document. You can see the original HTML/Text version here.

If you are interested in the subject of image to ASCII art conversion, I also suggest to check out my post where I reviewed a number of online and desktop image to text converter tools.

I also wrote a post about video to text conversion via the vlan video player with special conversion plug-in.

If the subject of ASCII and ANSI text art is new to you and you would like to learn more about this old school art form that actually pre-dates the computer, check out my ASCII Art Academy for more resources and information.

Semi-related: Did you see my post about ASCII/RTTY art nudes versus their original Centerfold Photographs?
I still need help with matching up more of the ASCIIs with their source photographs. You can help.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Matching Nude ASCII Art Pieces with Playboy Centerfolds

I posted earlier this month the article ASCII Art Nudes versus Original Playboy Centerfolds where I show for several ASCII Nude pictures of my ASCII Nudes collection the original photograph that was used by the text artist.

I updated the original article, which showed the originals for 29 40 ASCII pieces, and added one more match that I found afterwards. Since then I even found two more matches, which I did not add to the article yet.

The obvious matches are taking care of and also the ones where the file name or content of the ASCII itself had useful and correct hints about the original photograph. I were also able to match a number of ASCII's to photographs where the ASCII had completely incorrect information, such as the wrong name of the girl.

Now it's tougher to find corresponding photographs and I could use some help with it. It is not such a bad job actually. You get to watch a lot of beautiful girls naked hehe.

I also ran into cases where I am not 100% sure, if I matched the ASCII with the right photograph. Like this one.

The arm position is right, the pose is the same. The breast size is about the same and the hair resembles also the photograph. I am pretty sure that I found the right photograph, but a second opinion would increase my confidence even more.

If you want to help matching ASCII pictures to Playboy photographs, then you will need in addition to the ASCII pictures from my gallery, also the Playboy Magazine photographs from all issues, right?

Guess what, I happen to have a collection of those :). I zipped the photographs up into one file for each decade of Magazine publications.

Playboy Magazine Centerfolds Photographs (Complete) and additional Photographs from the Mag:

• 50's (93 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?jjnzwynyeyq
• 60's (92 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?nyzmmwzgi2m
• 70's (111 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?fjylwngwgjn
• 80's (110 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?k1zmwfihqtz
• 90's (69 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?tkgnnzi25ot
• 00's (269 MB) http://www.mediafire.com/?nnwdtzd5mod

Here is also a zip file with the collection of my work files. It includes PNG versions of all the ASCII art pictures and the already matched photographs. I also sorted the pictures where I did not find a match yet by the pose of the girl in the picture. I found out that this helps with finding a matching photograph. Poses like kneeling, sitting, lying and standing and "standing" broken down even further into "front", "behind", "left side" and "right side".

ASCII Nudes work Images
Zipped 38 MB* http://www.mediafire.com/?he22vyjndtj (Updated 04/2009)

*The 38 MB Zip file contains the photographs of the already matched pictures, the side by side pictures from my blog post, the original ASCII art pieces in text and PNG format, thumbnails and notes that might help with uncovering more original source photographs that were used by the text artists.

If you find matches, please post them in the comments section of this post. Post the PNG image file name of the ASCII picture and the image file name of the photograph that you believe to be the original.

Update: Including the picture above, I now have matched 40 ASCII art pieces and updated my original blog post with those matches. I matched "Anna", "Ingrid", "Kelly", "Susan", "nude330", "nude342", "nude353", "nude357", "nude1312" and "nude1317". I noticed that some of the originals used are not the Centerfolds itself, but other photographs from within the magazine as well (I am not surprised, but thought that I will mention it). My image collections contain some of those other images but by far not all of them. Also not included are the pictorials, which were also used for some of the ASCII art pieces.

Promo Video for ASCII Nude Collection

I also created a short promotional video for my ASCII Nudes collection and for my article about the match-up with Playboy Centerfolds. YouTube and MySpace made already a fuss out of it, because the video shows some nipples. It's not pornography for Christ's sake and the YouTube account warning for violation of their community guidelines was a bit too strong of a response for my taste.

 

So I created a censored version for YouTube and MySpace where all nipples are covered, even the ASCII nipples.

That makes the stuff look even more funny than I wanted. You can see for yourself what I mean by that.

I put the uncensored version up on Vimeo.com, which I used to embed the video into this blog post as well. You can download the uncensored natural version of this video in 720x480 pixels resolution and .AVI format (XVID) at Mediafire.com as always. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com. Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCII Art Nudes versus Original Playboy Centerfolds

I put up last year a collection of 100 ASCII Art pictures that have nude girls as motive. Most of them originate from the pre-computer/ASCII art era, when teletype and its text art, RTTY art (pronounced "ritty"), where predominant and popular among hobby ham radio operators. Some of them are even older than that and might even date back to the time of keyboard art.

After I watched once more the video of RaD Man/ACiD and his presentation at the Assembly 2004 demo party in Helsinki, Finland about the history of text  art where he showed an example of nude teletype text art and then the original centerfold photograph from Playboy Magazine, I started doing some digging myself.

As of today, I was able to find the original photograph for 29 30 40 of the 100 ASCII nude images from my collection. I wanted to integrate them somehow into that page, but could not figure out a good way to do it yet.

To avoid holding things back forever, I decided now to write a blog post about it and show my findings that way.

I will show the original photographs of the old Playboy Magazine Issues next to the Image of the ASCII art version of it. I converted the original text images to PNG, because it makes it easier for this purpose. You can still find the originals in my collection to verify that those pictures really originate from text and are not some kind of Photoshop trick or something like that. I also flipped some of the ASCII images, if the centerfold was in landscape format instead of the usual "letter" style format.

I also was concerned about copyright issues that this might cause with Playboy Magazine, but old school RTTY (teletype) enthusiast and collector of teletype text art, John Sheetz (K2AGI), mentioned in an interview for the BBS Documentary with Jason Scott Sadofsky that Playboy Magazine actually embraced this stuff and even published one of Don Royer's (WA6PIR) centerfold creations in text in one of their print issues.

I hope that Playboy still has this attitude today and will see this publication as free promotion and advertisement for their current print magazine.

I found out during my research that there are sometimes multiple ASCII art versions of the same photograph, which is pretty interesting, because it shows the different styles and quality of the text artists who created those ASCII images. Let's get started! Click the thumbnails to watch the larger versions of the images below.

The Link of the thumbnail version of the ASCII links to the PNG image version of the ASCII. I added links to the original ASCII text files below each ASCII thumbnail. I also added a link there to an image where it shows the photograph and the ASCII side by side (JPG). Please note that the “side by side” images are not proportional to the originals they are merely meant for illustration purposes.

The Centerfold Miss March 1964, Nancy Scott, for example was used for three ASCII images in my collection.

	original ASCII – side by side	org ASCII – side-by-side	org ASCII – side-by-side

Miss May 1970, Jennifer Liano was used for two ASCII images. One of them used the wrong name for the girl and called it "Kathy" instead of "Jennifer".

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss January 1970, Jill Taylor

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss February 1969, Lorrie Menconi

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss October 1964 - Rosemarie Hillcrest

Noticed that the two ASCII images are a “mirror” of the photograph? This cannot be coincidence. I assume that there is another photograph that is virtually the same, but matching the pose in the ASCIIs. I had the same with the image of Marianne Gravatte. The used photograph was a mirror of the widely popular centerfold picture, but I was able to dig up the not so popular photograph. I hope that I will find the one for Rosemarie Hillcrest too. However, I decided to show them, even though it is not EXACTLY the source photograph, but it is coming close enough to it for all intents and purposes here :).

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Now the single match gallery for the cases where I only have one ASCII  matching one original photographs.

Miss January 1966, Judy Tyler original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1966, Susan Bernard original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1968, Paige Young original ASCII – side by side
Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1969, Jean Bell original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1969, Claudia Jennings original ASCII – side by side
Miss October 1970, Mary & Madeleine Collinson original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1971, Claire Rambeau original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1972, Ellen Michaels original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1973, Miki Garcia original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1973, Christine Maddox original ASCII – side by side	Miss April 1978, Pamela Jean Bryant original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1978, Karen Morton original ASCII – side by side	Miss January 1980, Gig Gangel original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1980, Teri Peterson original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1982, Cathy St. George original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1983, Ruth Guerri original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1984, Dona Speir original ASCII – side by side
Miss April 1984, Lesa Ann Pedriana original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1984, Tricia Lange original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1971, Cynthia Hall original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1960 - Elaine Paul   original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1960 - Kathy Douglas original ASCII – side by side	Morganna Roberts - The Kissing Bandit original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1972 Carol O'Neal original ASCII – side by side	Miss "Ape Girl" - Victoria Principal - 09/1973 original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1976 - Karen Hafter original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1974 - Nancy Cameron original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1983 - Marianne Gravatte original ASCII – side by side

That's it and all that I got so far. I try to find more matches, but it's not that easy. The names and notes of the ASCII images is not always very detailed and some times even wrong. In some cases is the original also not the Playboy centerfold, but something else.

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED! There are still plenty of ASCII art pieces in my gallery that need to be matched to their reference photograph (Playboy Magazine Centerfolds, Pictorials and other Photo Sources). I wrote another blog post about this project, where I also provide some more information and several downloads that help with finding the original photos for the remaining ASCII art images. See details here. Hey, looking at beautiful nude girls is not a bad job at all :)

I hope that you liked my discoveries. Let me know in the comments below.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

Time for Another ASCII and More

It has only been two months, a bit less actually, since I created my last piece of ASCII text art.

Well, I did it again. Actually more than just a logo as I did the last time for CPI. I also design the NFO file body and more. I will show you the details further down below. I am pretty proud of myself, because I did not use any of my old styles for this new ASCII. I tried something different. I think that the result is very good, but it will be for others to decide if that is the case or not.

I also created a FILE_ID.DIZ logo for them in oldskool ASCII (Amiga style), which I do not consider myself particular good at. I actually said always that oldskool ASCII's should stay where they belong, on the Amiga, where they look right and not on the PC, which displays them much different as you can see at my article about the different art styles in the underground text art scene.

While I had the creative urge going, I also created VGA pixel logos for the same group. It must have been their lucky weekend I guess. hehe.  It could also be that the release that they announced where this artwork will be used was highly motivating for me :)

The second VGA logo. Simple and much smaller than the first one. It can also be read much easier.

The VGA logos were used for a cracktro, together with an old pixel art font of mine, which I highlighted in a blog post last December. The font took me hours to create and I was a little bit disappointed that it was only used for one Genesis intro, coded by Synec, which was only used for one or two releases and that's it. That particular intro is also one of the few that I have problems with to capture and publish in video format :(

I am glad that it was now used again. The music is also cool. It was created by Paso from Berlin and Dytec (and Dynamix & Remedy, the Sysop of Ice Cream and the coder & musician of the Cebit1993 party winning Amiga 500 dentro called Vaginal Massacre).

The tune was also used on the PC once, also for a Genesis intro by Hetero, with graphics by Dream Design, together with a second song, which IMO sucked. A randomizer determined which of the two songs was played and it appeared to me that the shitty song was played much more often than this cool one by Paso. I am sure that he will be glad that one of his tunes was used again in a cracktro.

Okay, here is the screen capture video of the new cracktro:

RoORS Cracktro 2009 V2 from Carsten Cumbrowski on Vimeo.

You can download the video in AVI format (76 MB) here at Mediafire.com 

I hope that you like my new stuff. Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Convert Video to ASCII Text Art

Uh, third post in 2 days... that surprises even me. Hehe

It was by coincidence actually, but somebody at Mahalo Answers made me aware of the feature of the free VLC (VideoLan) video player to convert video images to color ASCII art (some would call this ANSI hehe) in real-time.

I thought that this is a cool feature, just by hearing about it. I downloaded the player and was unable to find the option for the ASCII art output, so I asked the guy at Mahalo Answers about it and luckily for me, he answered this question as well (a bit delayed, which made me drop the ball on it as well).

The feature is buried deeply within the configuration options of the player and not that easy to find.

To help you with this problem, see my step by step guide to enable the feature in the VideoLan player. Every step is illustrated with a screen shot, so that there should not be any excuses for why you could not set it up yourself properly. Start with getting the latest version of the VideoLan video player at VideoLan.org (note: the latest version does not have this feature anymore. See note at the end of the post for details). The player is available across platform, over a dozen different Linux and Unix distributions and versions. Binaries for Windows, Macintosh Mac OS X, BeOS and Syllable are also available by the way. It's released under the GNU License.

Step by Step Guide to Enable the Color ASCII Art Output Module Configuration in the VLC Video Player

1. Start the VLC/VideoLan media player and open any supported video file.

2. Click on "Settings" in the top menu navigation and select "Preferences"

3. Audio is selected by default at the left. Check out the bottom-right where you can find a check box labeled "Advanced Options", which should be unchecked (default). Check that box to enable the Advanced Options.

4. Back to the navigation to the left. Click on the plus sign next to "Video" in the preferences box to open the configuration tree node for the "Video" options.

5. Click on the "Output Modules" node

6. Change the "default" in the drop down options for video output module to "Color ASCII Art Video output"

7. Click "Save" in the lower left of the window

8. Stop the video that you opened, if it isn't stopped already or if you stopped it after step 1.

9. Press "Play" to re-start the video again with the new video output module

Here are some results of me playing with that option for some videos of mine to give you an idea of how the real-time converted video images look in text mode with colors. I am not sure yet, if the module sticks to the 16 pre-set colors defined for PC MS DOS ANSI, which would be really cool. It may uses other colors instead. I have to do some more tests to find that out.

 
Playing Around with the VLC Color ANSI Art Video Output Module from Carsten Cumbrowski on Vimeo.

You can download this video in AVI format at Mediafile.com.

The player itself is worth checking out in general, beyond the ASCII output feature, which is kind of a "hidden treasure" within the features set of this open source video player. It supports virtually all major video formats, including Mpeg, AVI, QuickTime MOV/MP4, Windows Media WMV/ASF, Macromedia/Adobe Flash (FLV), the open source Matroska, Real Media (RealPlayer), OGG, FLAC and even Midi and raw DV video, WAV, MP3 audio etc.

It can play back streaming video UDP, TCP and DCCP/RTP Unicast or Multicast, HTTP/FTP and MMS in addition to traditional DVD video and audio, Audio CD, Video CD and SVCD, DVB from Satellite, Digital TV and cable television. A lot of stuff for NO BUCK at all. You cannot beat free, or can you?!

Also check out my previous posts about ASCII and ANSI Text Animation:

• ASCII plus Animation is ASCIImation
• What is ANSI Animation or ANSImation?
• Beck ASCIImation and a Walking Man 7-Bit ASCII
• my ASCIImations and ANSI Animations Video Play List at YouTube
• Review of Image to Text (ASCII) Converters

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Update: I just learned that the current version of VLC (Version 0.9.8a, 16 MB) does not have the ASCII output feature anymore. I have VLC Player Version 0.8.6f Janus (wxWidget interface) from last year, where the feature is still there. You can download this older version here from my web site: vlc-0.8.6f-win32.zip (9.19 MB). I don't know why they would remove such a nice feature from their player. Mhhh.

FILE_ID.DIZ Stories... A Trip Down Memory Lane

I remember the days when there was no such thing as "file_id.diz" and users had to enter a description for every single file that you uploaded manually. A pain in the ass and often causing poor descriptions of your file directory, because most users (especially in the "Warez Scene" or "Software Pirates Scene") did not have the time to enter very long and descriptive details to every file.

Remember, there was no copy-and-paste nor multi-tasking at that time either.

I know that the AMIGA guys had tools that worked similar to the Windows Clipboard. For that reason was the Amiga scene also the first that introduced the mini ASCII logos of release groups that AMIGA couriers used for the BBS file descriptions to make the files more prominent.

Oldskool (AMIGA style) file_id.diz ASCII design for the Elite Warez PC release group Razor 1911

. . Quake III (c)Id–Software final CD–Rip __________ . /________ \ –============– : –[01/99]– : | _\ )__/|______ ____|\ __ _/––– | /___/ _____ / __ \ \/ \ ––\_ \––– | . \ < |/ /____\ | .\_/ ––/ – – | |\______|___________/ | ––– – – | / .:.nineteeneleven.:.\ | roy –== |/ ===================== \| ====– .

Logos were adapted by the PC scene after file_id.diz was introduced by Clark Development Corporation (I believe that was with PC Board V14.5, but I am not 100% sure, it could also been V15.0).

The first ASCII (file_id) logos for PC releases were Amiga style designs, often even the same logos used by the Amiga section of the group, if it had any.

I don't want to show off, but I truly believe that I was the first one who created and used a Block ASCII (PC) style file_id for releases. It was the file_id.diz design for my first PC group that I co-founded called Cardinals in early 1993 and merged entirely into TRSI/Faith in 1994.

Quick Info: What is File_ID.diz?

File_ID.diz is a file name for a small text-file that is added to a compressed archive file (such as ZIP, the de-facto standard for distributing programs via Bulletin Board Systems). The file_id.diz is added by the creator of the program archive file and contains the name of the program and maybe some additional useful information. The sole purpose of the file was the use on bulletin board systems. After a file was uploaded by the user, the BBS software looks for the existence of a file_id.diz file in the archive and uses its content automatically for the description in the file listings, if it finds one. If no file_id.diz was included in the file, the user had to enter a description for it manually.

Cardinals released awesome trainers for PC games with an amount and quality of options never seen before (or after)... Fuck "Dread"! They were "lamer" hehe.

The Cardinals File_ID.DIZ design in Block ASCII Style from early 1993. The First of it's kind? (proof me wrong!) Also see this and here.

. ▄ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▐██ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ██▀█ ██▀█ ██▀▄ ██▀▄ ▀ ██▀▄ ██▀█ ██ ██▀█ ██ ▀ ██ █ ██ █ ██ █ ██ ██ █ ██ █ ██ ▄ ██▄▄ . ██ ▄ ██▀█ ██▀▄ ██ █ ██ ██ █ ██▀█ ██ █ ▄▄ █ ██▄█ ██ █ ██ █ ██▄▀ ██ ██ █ ██ █ ██▄█ ██▄█ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▓█ ▄▄▄▄▄trained▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▀ ▓▒ ▀ █ ▒░ █ ▄ ▄ ▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀ . .

Cardinals trainer releases did stick-out on the boards, because the big and bold block ASCII logo was hard to miss among those oldskool ASCII logos and regular text.

Hey, If you don't believe me that the Cardinals file_id was the first one using a Block ASCII logo, fine. If you can show me BBS listings from before that where block ASCII was used, I'd appreciate it (actually not, but for history sake, I'd rather proven wrong than making a false claim).

Anyhow. I used Block ASCII for the Cardinals file_id, because I wanted it to stick out. I also used extensively Block ASCII for the Cardinals NFO ASCII that was also not very typical at that time.

Well, the coders had to learn the ALT + numeric ASCII character code combination for 4 block characters... not too much to ask. ALT-176, ALT-177, ALT-178 and ALT-219 :) It wasn't for long that other groups followed suit and also used Block ASCII for their file_id's and I was thinking about even better ways to make file descriptions stick out more.

Block ASCII Codes 101 :)

                        ░  = ASCII character 176
                        ▒  = ASCII character 177
                        ▓  = ASCII character 178
                        █  = ASCII character 219

In order to generate those characters, you had to press the "ALT" key and enter the ASCII code 
on the numeric keyboard (while holding the ALT-Key pressed) and then release the ALT-Key at which 
moment it would render the character that represents the entered ASCII value.
                 

I thought about ANSI and created the designs that you can see here in my deviation for testing. They were never used of course. First of all, the ESC sequences would have been a problem in many cases.

Also the length of File descriptions (per line) ... I believe it was 42 characters for most BBS systems, would have posed an issue. The color formatting of the ANSI codes (or PC Board color codes, if you would have used those) limited very much the characters that would remain for the logo itself.

AMIGA-Sysop's and traders would also had have some problems with those... It was an interesting concept for a moment, but failed for very practical reasons.

Long, but nice story eh?

I almost forgot about this, but then I found my ANSI file_id.diz designs and it all came back to me :).

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

First ASCII Art Piece of Mine in Ages

I cannot believe that I actually managed to create my first piece of block ASCII Art in ages... eons might be the better word to describe the time frame between the creation of this ASCII  and the last ASCII of mine that I created before this one.

The ASCII that I created was a long over-due request by Mad Max, the co-founder of the old scene group CPI, Canadian Pirates Inc., which I actually joined myself in September of last year.

I had this open request on my conscience for way too long and I am glad that I got this off my head now. I also hope that Mad Max will like the NFO file logo. I have to admit, that I got a little bit rusty (old maybe? :( ).

I sent the ASCII to him via email, but did not hear back from him since then. I will find out sooner or later :)

I also Finished Something Else ;) !!!

I wrote about the amount (count) of different SAC releases across all pages earlier this year.  I also made stuff available for download in re-sorted and grouped bundles by content type rather than by SAC artpack.

• Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads
• Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads - Part II

More SAC Art Put Up for Access On-Line via Web Browser

That was all nice and good, but does not make the old-school art of ASCII, ANSI or Pixel Art accessible (viewable) online and across platforms.  Okay, so I took it upon myself to convert the thousands of ASCII and ANSI art pieces that several dozen artists produced over a period longer than 10 years and converted all of them into PNG image format, which is compatible with everything today. I also converted the Pixel art that was for a large degree saved in the old IFF (or LBM of Deluxe Paint II) format and other similar depreciated formats, which are today not in use anymore.

1. ASCII ART Collection

All 3,000+ Superior Art Creations ASCII Art Pieces from 30+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 30 separate picture sets, sorted by artists most of the time.

2. ANSI ART Collection

All 450+ Superior Art Creations ANSI Art Pieces from 25+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 10 separate picture sets, 9 sets for the nine most productive ANSI artists in SAC and a tens set with various ANSI art by 15+ SAC artists who did not produce very much ANSI art for the packs overall.

I created by far the most ANSI art of all (over 130 ANSI art pieces), followed by Rave with 105 pieces. Hetero did 72, Dark Star aka Puschel did 25, Raiser 24, Shot and Kenet 18 ANSI's each, SL aka Strike Light 16, Webpige0 12 and 56 ANSI art pieces created by over 15 different artists.

3. Pixel Art Collection

All 500+ of Superior Art Creations oldskool pixel VGA art pieces, logos for the most part, created by 30+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 16 picture sets. The largest number of pixel art contribution was done by the following SAC artists (alphabetically): Asphyx (ASX), Cokine (COK), Creator (CRE), Creator of Hell (CH/CoH), Desolation Angel (DA), Dream Design (DD), Eboy (EB), Fefst (FST), Ferrex (FX), HKultra (HKU), [K], Kenet, Moolok (MOO), Nerv (N,NR), Pasha (P), Puschel (PL), Roy, Sergeon, Senser (SNS) and Webpige0 (W0)

SAC artists who contributed to pixel art, but only very little were: Antibody (AB), B5, Bazilla (BAZ), ED, Flames, FX, GTI, Hetero (HT), IX, Marky (M), Mattey, Mr.Jezus, n]-[wa, Poldi (PD), Rave (RV), Silent (SiL), Sprocket , Techbit (TB), TPK

Putting over 400 MP3 Songs Up for Play-Back in Browser

All MP3 files are stored in a single "Directory" at Amazon S3 - Help Wanted and Appreciated

I already uploaded most of the 400+ tracker music files converted to MP3 to my Amazon S3 Account. I need to check and then upload if I missed any song and then think up a way to put them up somewhere for easy accessibility and play-back capabilities via web browser, without too long load-times or requirement for setting up another browser plug-in, which would have to be downloaded first. All this should of course take as little as time as possible, without sacrificing the accessibility of the music by platform restrictions.

Ideas and suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Whatever the suggestion might be, it has to run on MS IIS6 on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, Classic ASP and/or ASP.NET and/or PHP 4. If it requires MySQL 5 and/or MS SQL Server 2005 portable or developer edition, fine. Also MS Access 2007 as database storage for some settings and catalog content would be alright.

Thanks and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads - Part II

I posted yesterday Part I of my findings about the Superior Art Creations (SAC) Art Pack Releases.

I was sorting today through the ANSI and ASCII releases and also uploaded all the music files converted to MP3 to Mediafire.com for download by anybody who is interested and not able to play back the music in its original format (MOD, XM, S3M, DMF, IT and SID). You can find them all at this web address. More download links can be found at the end of this post.

I shouldn't have made jokes about the file duplications by some of the SAC pixel artists by saying "funny, he obviously had no directory with all his art work in it, like the rest of us hehe", because it appears that I made the same error myself a few times when it comes to my ASCII art releases. I file name duped pretty often actually so I should have kept my mouth shut, because it seems that I am the worst offender of them all hehe.

But more to that a but later. Lets start with some additional music dupes that I found. I believe the following facts might not be as interesting as the stuff in my previous post, but it is interesting for me and maybe a few folks out there and that is enough for me to publish it on my blog hehe. Sorry :)

File Name          Pk   MP3 File Name      MP3 MD5 Check Sum
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
mt_addi.sid        27 mt_addi.mp3        1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21
mt_holba.sid       27 mt_holba_beer.mp3  dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055
mt_addiction.sid   28 mt_addiction.mp3   1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21
mt_holba_beer.sid  28 mt_holba_beer.mp3  dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055

I did not catch it myself. It was Mediafire.com who does automatically a de-duping based on the MD5 hash (obviously). The fact that the files have the same size in MP3 and SID format (MP3: 4,799,520 bytes, SID: 6,142 bytes) made me wonder, because I noticed this during the conversion.

There are in fact 25 unique SID songs by Maktone, MRD and Crome that have the same size. I tried a few to see if there are dupes, but the ones I checked were fine. Below is the list of the 25 songs that I mentioned.

Obviously not, because there were two real dupes actually.

MD5 Check Sum                    *File Name
-----------------------------------------------------------------
1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21 *mt_addi.mp3
dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055 *mt_holba_beer.mp3

5e3319cd92b5229dcfd36455d5a7a598 *mrd_lazyrainydays.mp3
441187bae1564e4cf97f998adc92ee36 *mrd_graduationseasonfinal.mp3
ae4f190f150a6acb48d2fcb61aec08d8 *mrd_wondersoftheworldfinal.mp3
d407917b591cd2f4fdebdaadd6ca3c0a *MRD_RCM.mp3
654449199e164bbecc0c4e2ff11f6955 *mt_white_s.mp3
dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055 *mt_holba.mp3
a5aefa7e2c7a6cba1ce93a36cb059c67 *MRD-Airikka_High_Kick.mp3
3e3c9255d4bd5873474e1ca7346a84dd *MRD-Knark_I_Karusellen.mp3
ebf7397b9fb8a004a5d0eff788c71ed4 *mt_nag_cham.mp3
f428fbeb5742cae559a3ea53ef53ff61 *mt_kingsize.mp3
ea4c9a758e5c2972d1478be35516b8fa *mt_mortal.mp3
52a4565a7a6418d15743ae915a5b4abe *mt_hansa.mp3
1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21 *mt_addiction.mp3
673c85d6306a3e9db345b9bbd6f7cf9b *MRD-Disco_Night.mp3
ba58e84da350b367c533901fcf49c11e *MRD_SG.mp3
c021cfeafa008da75308a026060ccf6c *crome-For_the_Years.mp3
e0aa086df18ff8892f10cfacc0c28a3c *crome-Bleib_wie_du_bist.mp3
dc91edc0775ef95f87c14cf50984b06e *!bla.bat
854553bcdf4fe85b59fdc515c1ad03b0 *mt_druid2rmx.mp3
33bb3b7b044bb8d0e8adb826e96b534b *MRD-Good_Bad_Necrotoad.mp3
25c6b194fd33085baa6fe851a42e2346 *mt_gob_king.mp3
7eaed33fd861fe5b8767ca36fc512774 *mt_fltdemo1.mp3
908997a8b0ed342b5b4f8eeab747f422 *mt_3ankare.mp3
b9c509d805eedaca308631770a8e4676 *MRD-Polymatrix.mp3
3661d853298174e0d301dfc104021924 *mrd_questoflightfinal.mp3

Btw. Just for clarification, in the case that you didn't get it already, File Name Dupe means that the two files have the same name, but differ in size and/or modified date. Full Dupe means that not only the file name is the same, but the size and last modified date as well.

ANSI File Name Dupes: 5
ASCII Full Dupes: 22
ASCII File Name Dupes: 45

ANSI File Name Dupes
------------------------------------
Pack 7               Pack 14
HT-PC2.ans           GTI-AR.ANS 
    
Pack 8               Pack 30
RV-RAY.ANS           w0-sacns.ANS 
RV-ULBY.ANS    
    

ASCII Full Dupes
------------------------------------
Pack 13              Pack 20                 Pack 33
SL-CO.ASC            CH-ACE.ASC              asx-bmf.txt 
                     CH-CLASS.ASC            dip-dsco.asc 
Pack 16              CH-DE3.ASC              asx-dsm.nfo 
SL-SUB2.ASC          CH-ESTRA.ASC            asx-dsm2.diz 
                     ch-mw2.asc              asx-sven.txt 
Pack 17              CH-MW.ASC               asx-svn2.txt 
ARL-SS.ASC           CH-PNC.ASC              S!-trd.diz 
ARL-FLOO.ASC         CH-REUNI.ASC    
                     CH-RISE2.ASC    
                     CH-RNDIZ.ASC    
                     CH-RNS3.ASC   

   
ASCII File Name Dupes
--------------------------------------
Pack 6               Pack 18                 Pack 25
ROY-DTCD.ASC         RV-CNC2.ASC             CH-RISE.ASC 
                     RV-CNC3.ASC             CH-RNS2.ASC 
Pack 8               ROY-CNCD.ASC    
ROY-PNSD.ASC         ROY-LSWA.ASC            Pack 27
ROY-IMPD.ASC                                 aln-solskogen.txt 
                     Pack 19                 scr-vite.nfo 
Pack 10              ARL-HIJA.ASC   
ROY-PNS3.ASC         sns-sacd.asc            Pack 28
                                             ROY-DEVN.ASC 
Pack 13              Pack 20   
ROY-SDMD.ASC         CH-DE.ASC               Pack 30
                     CH-RNS.ASC              cDr-soh.asc 
Pack 14              CH-MOTV8.ASC    
ROY-IMP.ASC          roy-phs.asc             Pack 32
HLX-SAC2.ASC         sns-eur.asc             dip-dark.asc 
HLX-SAC3.ASC         sns-pdx.asc    
                     SQZ-DST.ASC             Pack 33
Pack 16                                      nr-sac.asc 
ARL-PVM.ASC          Pack 21   
HLX-SAC.ASC          sns-stc.asc             Pack 34
ROY-PCY.ASC          frx-stc1.asc            cDr-sweatshop.asc 
ROY-NBD.ASC          frx-mth3.asc    
                     sl-ref.nfo    
Pack 17      
ARL-DREA.ASC         Pack 24   
ARL-NGT.ASC          scr-sac.nfo    
RV-CNC.ASC           sns-stat.asc    
ROY-PHC.ASC       
scr-cms.nfo       

Special ASCII Packs (which were already included in my original count)

Pack 32
cDr-glftpd: 75 files

Pack 34
nerv-purpleous: 33 files
S!-phus9: 7 files

Total ASCII: 3,001 (instead of 3,023)

Found another music dupe, Crm_Turr.xm Pack 21 and crm_turrica1.xm from pack 23 are the same. I discovered this one by accident.

Adjusted Music Files: 425 (instead of 428)

I had the music disks not in my original count. I used the dedupe feature by Mediafire.com for the MP3 to find out, which songs in the MDs where new or new versions of older songs that were already released in SAC art packs.

Crome's I Miss You Amiga: 25 files, 5 dupes = 20 original
SvenZZon's Chip Disk: 22 files, 5 dupes = 17 Original
Total = 37 Originals

Music Total: 463 Files

SvenZZon included a little intro with his music disk. I did not realize that until yesterday. Here is a capture of this mini intro. It's from 2004 as his music disk. Code by Red and Graphics by Webpige0/SAC. Music by SV of course hehe.

Backup Link to Video on YouTube.com
Download the video in AVI format from Mediafire.com

I then also found an intro with the same file name (except SACtros where it is expected).

File Name Dupe Executable: FRX-CRO1.EXE

in Pack 18
Date Created: Saturday, May 29, 1999, 00:03:38
Size: 26,063 bytes

in Pack 19
Date Created: Monday, September 06, 1999, 14:09:58
Size: 26,331 bytes

The date and size of the executables are different so I count the re-release as a file duplicate only although its not an entirely new intro (borderline cheat hehe).

More Downloads

• SAC Original NFO Files and File_IDs-!nfo.rar (286 KB)
• SAC Original PPEs - !PPE.rar (132 KB)
• SAC Original ANSI Art - !ANSI.ORG.rar (616 KB)
• SAC Original ASCII Art - !ASCII.Org.rar (2 MB)
• SAC Original Exe and Tools - !Exe.ORG.rar (7,4 MB)
• SAC Music in MP3 Format (over 400 individual files)

Okay, that's it for now.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads

I am still working on sorting through the Superior Art Creations (SAC) art packs and to make them easy accessible via the web (e.g. my web site and elsewhere). The sorting brings up some interesting facts about the art pack releases that I want to share with you. All SAC Art Packs are available for download here and also here at my site.  

Facts, Stats and Figures

• 2 of the 35 art packs included  no music release at all, packs 18 and 19. All art packs included ANSI, ASCII and VGA pixel art work, but it was once  close to the release of an art pack without pixel art. Pack 08 from September 1996 was 2 files in size, but it only included one piece of pixel art, a small SAC logo by Hetero that he created for the packs SACtro (SAC0996A.ZIP and SAC0996B.ZIP). I guess we were lucky hehe.
• 2 pixel art images in pack 33 by Asphyx/SAC were a dupe (asx-madhat-final.jpg and asx-warlords-logo.png). The two images had been released already in SAC Pack 32 five months earlier that same year. It almost looked like as if Pasha duped a picture for art pack 27, but the images are different (p-abs.png). He just named the file for another logo the same as he did a logo for the same group that he created in the past (funny, he obviously had no directory with all his art work in it, like the rest of us hehe).
• 2 Tracker Modules were dupes. But also the musicians duped once. Two of them, one song each in the same art pack. Crome (CRM) and Maktone (MT) included a song in pack 28, which they already released in a previous pack (crm_dustinmyeyes.XM and mt_FLT01.MOD).
• 2 art packs did not include a File_ID.diz file to describe the content of the ZIP archive, pack 21 and 22 (shame on you Ferrex ;)).  Since art pack 29 was no member list or FTP/BBS list included in the NFO files, which makes it hard to impossible to complete my "All-Time SAC Member List".
• 2 members, both pixel artists, used the same file prefix for some time, creating confusion, not just back then, but also today (I know, because I got confused too). Kenet and [K] used both the file prefix "k-" in various art packs. "[K]" also used "K_", with the underscore instead of the dash and Kenet used his full name as prefix in his file names. I have not checked who used which prefix when, but it surely created a big mess, when I aggregated the artwork, because you files from both with the prefix "K-" in the file name.

• 484 ANSI art pieces were released in 35 art packs between December 1994 and March 2007. The packs also included the following ....
• 3,023 ASCII art logos, file_id.diz, NFO layouts, FTP site designs etc. Not including the SAC releases File_IDs and NFO files itself.
• 115 Executables (.EXE and .COM files), excluding tools, installers and viewers, but including Cracktros, BBS intros and Still Images that were converted to an executable (e.g. a BBS ad ANSI in a wrapper to show the ANSI without having the need of the ANSI.SYS driver loaded). Also included in this figure are the SACtros that came with some of the art pack releases, especially during the early days. You can watch the video recorded 13 SACtros that were released with the SAC Packs on my web site. I also captured most of the other intros from the packs already. I have not put them up on my web site yet, but on YouTube. You can download all of my recordings and more via this share at Mediafile.com and its subsequent sub directories.
• 534 Pixel Art Images. I converted all images that were not already  in Jpeg or PNG format to PNG (e.g. Deluxe Paint .LBM files, but also old GIF files, BMP, PCX and TGA). I want to put them up on the site one day, but for now Flickr.com must suffice. I created a special collection with a bunch of sets for all the pixel art images there.
• 428 MODs (ProTracker, TakeTracker and NoiseTracker modules), SIDs (Commodore 64 music files), XMs (Fasttracker 2 modules), S3Ms (Scream Tracker 3), ITs (Impulse Tracker), DMFs (X-Tracker) and MP3s (not including the separate music disc releases, which include music from the packs, but maybe also some stuff that wasn't released in a pack yet. I don't know yet. I need to check this.)

Tracker Music Play-back and Conversion to MP3

I just converted all the tracker modules and SIDs to MP3 format for the later use on my web site, to make the music accessible to a broader audience, because you cannot play tracker music without special software or player plug-ins. The conversion was a pain in the neck. I used DeliPlayer2 (no link, because their web site DeliPlayer.com seems to be down, but see this site for more info.) for most of the music, which worked fine, but unfortunately only one module at the time. I ran into some problems with about 15 or so of the over 400 mods. DeliPlayer said that it believes that the files are corrupted and refused to play/convert them. I checked with ModPlug Player for Windows and they played back fine.

I also tried WinAmp with the LifeAMP plug-in and the internal MOD input source plug-in, but the results were mixed. I have not checked the BASS module player plug-in and thus do not know, if it is any good. Also useful is the SidPlay plug-in for WinAmp for playing back the SID music files.

But then I discovered XMPlay, which beats all of the players and tools above. It has tons of plug-ins as well and even supports WinAmp plug-ins as well. With XMPlay was it a breeze to convert tracker music to MP3, WAV or other formats, including in batch mode and the option to save the results in the same folder as the source file. Damn, if I only had known earlier. It would have saved me hours of time that I wasted on manually converting one song at a time.

More Download Options

If you don't want to download all the art packs, but are interested in some of the stuff, then I have something for you that you might like. I sorted the original content of the packs by content type and put them into individual RAR archives. I did that already for the music files and the pixel art. I have not done yet a archive for the ANSI and ASCII art yet. I already had packages for the Intros and Cracktros available for download directly from my web site here.

• All pixel art releases (534 images) in original format (LBM, PCX, GIF, JPG, TGA and BMP were used by the artists). Total size of the RAR archive = 50 MB. Download via Mediafire.com here.
• 194 XM Fast Tracker 2 Modules (22 MB .RAR File) + it also includes the 47 modules from the two music disk releases by Svenzzon and Crome. Download via Mediafire.com here.
• 156 MOD Pro Tracker, Take Tracker and Noise Tracker Modules (2.4 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 26 SID Commodore 64 Music Files (50 KB, yeah, kilobytes :), .RAR File). Download here.
• 22 S3M Scream Tracker 3 Modules (2.8 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 14 DMF X-Tracker Modules (3.1 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 12 MP3 Mpeg-1 Layer 3 music files (35 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 4 IT Impulse Tracker Modules (1.5 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• more Downloads ...
• and even more Downloads ...

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Image to Text Converters Review

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 its own merits, but if this is will be the case is hard to tell before seeing the actual results.

The available converters online or off-line vary in sophistication, options for tweaking the results and what you can do with them.

I used for testing this passport photograph of mine. I always used the same image, regardless if I uploaded it, linked to it or used it with the desktop tool.

I never tweaked the image before I used it with the tools. I only used the options that were provided by the tools themselves to improve the results.

Lets start with the Online Tools.

Click on the images for a full size version of each screen shot. The small images are not meant to show you everything in detail already, which would be hard, even with 110% vision hehe.

Photo2Text.com ASCII to TEXT Converter

URL to online converter.

Here are screen shots of the tool and the three steps it takes to convert your image to ASCII art.

This converter delivers great results out of the box. The only bummer is that you cannot specify a URL for the image to convert. You have to upload it as a file.

The results with the default options is already perfect, but in some cases does it make sense to tweak the results, which you can do in real time on the results page.

I talked about it already a while ago at my personal blog.

You have a slider to adjust the "brightness" and also a drop down box that lets you select different sets of ASCII characters that will be used for the ASCII. One of the sets even includes the emulated block ASCII (high ASCII) characters of MS DOS (I love that one hehe)

To the left, picture in 7 bit ASCII (normal text characters). To the right, picture in Block ASCII. I adjusted the "brightness" a little bit to make it a bit lighter.

ASCII.MasterVB.NET Text to ASCII Converter Tool

URL to online converter.

As you can see in the screen shot, this tool is actually two tools in one. To the left is the form of the Image to Text converter and to the right is a Text to ASCII converter. I will say to the latter a little bit more further down below.

The MasterVB tool only allows the specification of the URL to an Image on the Internet. It does not offer an upload option to let users upload an image from their local hard disk.

I always used the setting 1 for "Quality" (best). I don't know why I should choose anything else. 

I selected as Size: 5 . The size only affects the used font size and not the ASCII width (number of characters per line in the text result). I selected "Show in HTML".

The image to the left shows the result for "In Color OFF" and the image to the right with the "In Color Option" enabled which is SLOW, so be patient.

The ASCII or ANSI is always large in size. You can only reduce its actual size (characters per line), if you reduce the image size yourself and put the smaller image up on the Internet in order to be able to use this tool with that image.

It returns good results, but then it is also easier to do so, if you do not have to deal with the problem of limited numbers of characters per line and rows you can work with. It serves its purpose and who cares nowadays, if the ANSI or ASCII is more than 80 Characters per line in width. Nobody uses MS DOS anymore anyway, right?! :)

The tool also has a neat Text to ASCII converter, which seems to be based on FIGlet.

Over 60 different ASCII art fonts are available. Also a preview of the font sets to make it easier to find out which font you like the best, without trying each and every one of them first. Most fonts are almost the same and I didn't find really cool ones.

Another ASCII font generator can be found at Network-Science.de/ASCII.

It does not provide the code, it's meant to copy and paste for email signatures for example. That's also the reason why the tool offers options like "alignment" and width in characters. It also has the option to "squeeze" the letters (by selecting "yes" for "Stretch", an obvious error) and to invert the text to be mirrored (if you think that is cool, or if you want to combine it with the none-mirrored version of the test.

GlassGiant.com/ASCII Image to Text Converter Tool

URL to online converter tool at GlassGiant.com/ASCII.

This tool provides almost no options for tweaking, except for the wight and font size. Nice is the fact that you have the choice between uploading an image from your local hard drive or providing an URL to the image on the Internet. The results are decent and usable for an out of the box/take it or leave it kind of tool.

The Homepage of the tool provides links to additional examples, which I did not include in my screen shot. My screen shot only shows the selection form of the conversion tool itself. To the right is the result of the conversion of my passport photograph.

   

Now lets look at some tools for the Windows Desktop.

The MagicSoft Image to ANSI/ASCII converter

Download link to MagicSoft Img2ASCII-ANSI

The interface is straight forward. You have the option to convert an image to either ANSI, Gray-scale or plain text (ASCII).

The first slider lets you specify how much percent of the pixels of the images will be converted. This setting has direct impact on the width and height of the results.

If you have an image that is 200x200 pixels and you say to render 100%, the ANSI or ASCII will be 200 characters wide and tall. You probably want to reduce that or change the font size, which is another option via a slider.

You can specify the background color and text to use.

I really wouldn't recommended to specify the Text to use, because it really uses this phrase again and again and the shading is only done by adjusting the color of the letters. If you want to do something with just words, check out the tool Textorizer, which will return much better results. So leave it empty and have the tool randomize the used characters.

A message pops up, if you select ASCII output stating that it is still in an early beta state. After looking at the conversion results, I tend to agree. It returned the poorest results of all tools that I tested. It's strength really lies in the conversion to ANSI, where it produces quite decent results.

Here are some examples.

ASCII Generator .NET (ASCGen dotNet) for Windows

Download link to ASCII Generator dotNet V0.96

This is a collaborative open source project. You can visit the projects web site at SourceForge.net, where you can also download the latest version of the tool and the source code of it as well.

Just by looking at the interface you know that you are dealing with something much more sophisticated than any of the other tools that I reviewed above.

This tool is really the Ferrari of Image to Text converters! You have so many options to play with (in real-time, seeing the results immediately) and the results are simply phenomenal.

You can shrink and enlarge the results at will, flip or rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, the character set used for the ASCII, the font and more and more and more.
The program also supports batch processing, if you have a large number of photos or images to convert to ASCII or ANSI.

It's a free tool, only available for Windows PC, but source code can be downloaded from their Sourceforge.net project page as well, if you like to work on a conversion for Linux or Macintosh.
A web based version of the tool would be cool tool. Anybody up to the challenge?

 

I created a short video that shows the feature of the ASCGen dotNet tool. And before I get tons of emails asking what the music in the background is, it's Chris Huelsbeck's "Sade" from the Commodore 64. You can download this song and others from the good old C64, converted to MP3 format, at this shared folder at Mediafire.com.

You can download this video in AVI format and 800x600 pixels resolution at Mediafire.com.

I hope that you find this review helpful. Have fun with converting your photographs and images to Text, or better ASCII or ANSI art hehe. Again, if you want to create serious ASCII/ANSI text art, check out my ASCII Art Academy page and subsequent pages. For the right tools to create hand-made text art check out my downloads page, where you find a bunch of tools for MS DOS, Windows or even Linux free for download.

If you need some inspiration and want to see some great hand-made, oldskool and new ANSI and ASCII art created by myself and also dozens of other artists, check out my gallery pages.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

What is ASCII Art? What is ANSI? and more!

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 chracters and not visible, such as Carriage Return, Line Feed (Line Break), the Tab character or the Escape character. The standard US-ASCII characters are the first 128 chracters of the character set, where 97 of them are usable for text and ASCII art.

What is 8-Bit ASCII?
8-bit ASCII art uses primarily characters after the 128 chracters of the US-ASCII character set. You cannot find those characters on your keyboard and could only generate them via programming code, special editors (like TheDraw or ACiDDraw) or by pressing the ALT-Key and then type the character code (a number between 128 and 255) on your numeric keypad, while keeping the ALT-Key pressed. Those upper or "higher" characters are suitable for basic graphical elements, such as box borders, corners. Those characters are unique to the IBM PC and MS DOS and are not compatible with other operating systems, such as UNIX, Linux or MAC OS.

What is ANSI?
ANSI is unique for MS DOS by Microsoft and the IBM PC. ANSI is a set of control sequences to manipulate the appearance of the text on the screen, to bolden text, making it itallic or blinking and to add some colors to your text. There are 16 pre-defined foreground colors, where 8 of them could also be used as background color.

The use of ANSI control sequences (called Escape sequences, because they all started with the ESC character) required special editing software, because unlike the 8-Bit upper characters, is there no easy way to generate those sequences by hand. In order for MS DOS to process and interpret those control sequences properly, a special driver had to be loaded, which came with the MS DOS operating system by default. The file for this driver was named "ANSI.SYS". This is where ANSI got his name from, which is sometimes confusing, because ANSI also stands for the American National Standards Institute, the organization who defined the US-ASCII standard.

And more...
I also added examples of the character sets 7-bit and 8-bit and the ANSI color schema. I also added a grid with the mapping of ANSI colors to HTML colors and their ESC sequence code.

New ANSI Tutorial
Another goodie that I finally added was a good and detailed ANSI tutorial by the artist Zerovision of the young ANSI art group called "Blocktronics". It uses the example of a picture that shows the movie character "Chucky" and how he re-created the picture in ANSI. It explains shading techniques and more in detail, why ZV decided to do this versus something else, etc. Very useful for beginners.

Group Update
It is funny, but I joined as of today a new computer group. Something that I didn't do for the past 10 years or so. I thought I am too old for this stuff, but then, it is a revival of an very old group by a bunch of very old guys like me (in terms of Scene life). The group is called "Canadan Pirates Inc." or CPI. A group with roots in Canada (duh) and some cracker scene history. The revived group does not do any cracking and warez anymore though. It will focus on Music, Intros, Demos and also scene history preservation, something that I already do for a few years now.



I chatted today on Facebook with Rod aka MadMax, co-founder of CPI and he asked me, if I would join. I was in touch with Rod for a while already and also had multiple lengthy phone calls about verious things, mostly whining about the lost past hehe. I said yes, so here I am... new member of CPI. :)

Well, that's some news.... I hope you will like the new content. I am out of here now.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC (and CPI)

Copyleft vs Public Domain

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 Disclaimer


This 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 domain by 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 Disclaimer


This piece of Art has been released into the public domain under
the Free Art Licence (FAL) 1.3 (Copyleft Attitude). See Disclaimer below.

This artwork was released under the Free Art Licence (FAL) 1.3 (Copyleft Attitude) This image is ineligible for copyright and therefore in the public domain, because it consists entirely of information that is common property and contains no original authorship. You are free to use, copy, distribute and modify it as long as long as your copies and derivations are redistributed under the FAL (or any other Copyleft) license as well.

Resources

• Copyleft (Wikipedia)
• Public Domain(Wikipedia)
• Copyright(Wikipedia)
• Free Art Licence (FAL) 1.3 @ ArtLibre.org
• Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons by Anna Nimus
• What is Copyleft? (Gnu.org)

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

New ASCII Art Contest at deviantART

Hello Everybody,

After a series of posts that were relatively unrelated to ASCII art and text art in general, now a pure one that ONLY talks about ASCII Art and nothing else. Ha, I knew that you missed those hehe.

Maija Haavisto aka DiamonDie organized another ASCII art contest over at deviantART.com. You might be familar with DiamonDie from Finland, because I have her ASCII Art Tutorial up on my site as part of my ASCII Art Academy for some time now.


What is she looking for?

Draw something in ASCII that I haven't seen before, something creative in technique, style, concept and/or subject matter. You could make something surreal, abstract, political, dadaistic or otherwise strange.

What is she NOT looking for?

... no kittens, Pikachus, roses or Santa Claus, unless you can make them stand out somehow.

No pornographic entries or anything that would violate the U.S. law, pretty much everything else goes.

There are the following technical requirements, because ASCII art is a bit too broad and not everything that falls under the term Text art or ASCII art is allowed for this contest.

• The entry must be an ASCII picture, of at least 10x10 and at most 80x200 characters (that's 80 characters per line and 200 lines). The entry must be drawn in a fixed-width font. Sorry, no extended characters (8-bit), colored ASCII or ANSI this time. If you don't know what this means, make sure you only use characters included in the green part of this table.
• The entry must be original and created by hand. Entries made with an image to ASCII converter are not taken into account. If your image looks converted or ripped, you will need to present a proof that you made it (ie. so called "step files", save the picture into several different files while drawing it).
• You can enter at most three pictures. You don't have to be a DA member to enter*.

* Just FYI. The deviantART membership is free and should not have been a hurdle for you in the first place that prevents you from entering the contest (or it would have been a very lame excuse if you would be using this excuse as a reason not to enter). Well, she does not make it a requirement this time, so it does not matter. One lame excuse was just eliminated before it even started hehe.

Submissions

Send a link to your artwork for download (you can upload it free at MediaFire.com or also at your account at deviantART (which is a bit trickier) via a personal note to DiamonDie using the deviantART internal mail system or via direct email to maija AT writeme DOT com.

Deadline

The deadline of the contest is 7/7/2008, July 7, 2008, no matter how you interpret the date (its the same in US and UK date format) :)

Prizes
What is in it for you?

The winner gets a "Dark Domain DVD" from ACiD Productions shipped free to your place anywhere on this planet (but where mail can be delivered). So living not in Europe or the United States is also not a reason for not entering the contest. :)

Dark Domain is a DVD-Rom (for the Computer), which contains text art from 1987 to the present, art packs, emags, text files and more. A complete and detailed list of all files included on this DVD-ROM may be found at www.darkdomain.org/allfiles.zip. The DVD is full and almost impossible to check entirely, unless you have some months of time to spare to look at the tens of thousands of images, ASCII and ANSI art pieces.

I list the DVD for a long time already at my scene related "online shop" here at RoySAC.com. There are a lot of other nice gems that might be of interest for you (sorry, but not part of the prizes for this contest)

To read all the details about the contest yourself, check out the original news post by DiamonDie at deviantART.com. Happy drawing and good luck to you.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

p.s. I might throw in something as well, like I did for Diamondie's ASCII art contest in 2006. I just don't know what I should throw in and if I should make it a surprise again as I did last time. I will check with Maija ;-).

100 Pieces of Nude ASCII Art Available Now!

Some quick, but exciting news. I introduced last summer my 30 Years of Naked ASCII Art gallery with 30 astonishing examples of text art that depict female nudity as motive for the pieces.

I expanded the gallery significantely today. I added a whopping 70!!! additional pieces. The gallery is 100 pictures big, or 200, if you count that every picture is available in the gallery in two different versions, one with black font on white background and another with white font on black background.

Here is how the selection screen looks like (image is a slightly scaled down version of the action selection screen due to space limitation at my blog)



I was so excited that I also created a banner animation to promote the gallery.



You can put it on your website as well, if you like to.
Here is the code:


<a href="http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.roysac.com/banners/nudeascii468x60b.gif" border="0" title="100 pieces of NUDE ASCII art"></a>


Enjoy!

Cheers Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ANSI Art Tutorials for my ASCII Art Academy

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 tutorials, but play also with the idea of creating a tutorial myself, which covers some basics. I will have to see, if I find the time to do this or not. If you know about any 8-Bit ASCII tutorials, please let me know, I'd appreciate that.

Until then, check out the vast content that is already there, 7-Bit ASCII tutorials, now also ANSI tutorials, articles, background information, history and much more.
Visit the ASCII Art Academy now!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Stats for Fun

I have an account at the social network and artist community deviantArt.com since March 3, 2006.

I looked at the statistics today and find it pretty interesting. Some numbers are not shown in the summary so I added them myself.

Stats Summary

• roy-sac has 9,985 pageviews total and his 306 deviations were viewed 23,717 times. He watches 60 people, while 86 people watch him.
• Overall, his deviations received 665 comments and were added to deviants' favourites 198 times, while he commented 1,383 times, making about 2.06 comments per day since he joined DA. This means that he gave 21 comments for every 10 that he received.
• His deviation with the most comments is deviantART ANSI Logo with 98 comments, and it is also his most favourited, with 73 favourites. His most viewed deviation is deviantART ANSI Logo with 5,266 views.
• 3 favourites were given for every 10 comments.
• Every 2.1 days he uploads a new deviation, and it's usually on a Sunday, with 66 (22%) of his deviations.
• His busiest month was July 2006 with 61 (20%) of his deviations.
• The majority of his deviations are uploaded to the Digital Art gallery (268), while his favourite category was Text Art > ASCII with 134 deviations.

• Comments per deviation: 2.17
• Favourites per deviation: 0.64
• Views per deviation: 77.5
• Comments per day: 0.99
• Favourites per day: 0.29
• Views per day: 35.35
• Pageviews per day: 14.88

Additional figures that were not provided in the summary by deviantArt.

• Deviation Comments: 671
• Deviant Comments: 373
• News Comments: 31
• Forum Posts: 16
• Journal Entries: 48
• Favorites: 490
• Items in Wish List: 31
• Scraps: 7
• Prints available in dA Shop: 13 which had 17 sales altogether. Most of the sales were done by myself hehe.
• I submit art to 21 categories, but the vast majority of them (306) were for the categories ASCII Text Art (134), ANSI Text Art (109) and Landscapes (15). The last one is for photographies.

The top four deviations by number of favorites.

1. deviantART ANSI Logo (73 favs, 98 comments, 5266 views)
2. deviantART Google Logo (24 favs, 64 comments, 2663 views)
3. deviantART ASCII Logo (6 favs, 10 comments, 1126 views)
4. TRSI Pixel Art VGA Logo (6 favs, 10 comments, 184 views)

My first ANSI for Melmac BBS is actually #4 by pageviews. It had 610 of them, which is three times more than the TRSI logo. However, the Melmac ANSI was never fav'ed though hehe.

It Was Time Again For A Clean-Up

As the title of this post already said, it was time again for a clean-up of my site RoySAC.com. Its content was growing significantely over the past months, which resulted in a very user unfriendly navigation and gave folks a hard time to find stuff on the site.



Homepage
The first thing you will notice is a much more cleaner, shorter and straight forward homepage of RoySAC.com. Old content from the homepage was moved to existing pages (SAC homepage, About Me page), to its own page (Closed Society BBS) or simply deleted.

ASCII Art Academy
The ASCII art primer and the three styles of the underground text art scene articles can not be found in the top navigation anymore. I created a whole new section call the ASCII Art Academy. The academy refers to those two articles and to a lot more stuff, including the existing ASCII art tutorials by Solid and DiamonDie plus five new ASCII art tutorials and the History of ASCII Art article by Joan G. Stark.

The new ASCII Art Academy can also be reached via the simple URL RoySAC.com/learn/.

Art Galleries
I had already four art galleries for my own stuff. Three more were added when my site took over as Superior Art Creations homepage. Then I added two more with ASCII and ANSI art from other artists and don't forget the special ASCII Nudes gallery and the ASCII morph pieces by Skylined.

Stuff was all over the place.

The galleries got a new "splash page" called... right, Art Galleries, which provides easy access to all the galleries and art pieces mentioned above.

Contact Page
In the case that you did not notice, I also have a contact form available now where you can send me a message without the need to dig for my email address and using your email client.

Site Navigation
The top navigation and additional text navigation in the footer of the site reflect the new structure of my site. I hope it makes things less confusing and make people actually find all the nice stuff, which I made available on my website.

Unchanged
The SAC section grew in size a little, the same is true for my About Me page, but the rest remained pretty much the same as it was before. Also the online shop, downloads page and links section did not require to be changed.

Feedback Wanted
Let me know what you think. I am open for any comments, suggestions, praise, complaints and other feedback about the new site structure and navigation. Contact me directly or leave a comment here at my blog. Thanks, I appreciate that.

Enjoy the site! Cheers!
Carsten aja Roy/SAC

Custom ASCII Art Prints

While I was at DefCon in Las Vegas did I check out a vendor who did custom t-shirts. This stuff is often very cheaply done and the t-shirts don't last very long. Three times washing it and the print would fade out. What caught my interest was the fact that they actually did very professional and high quality print and that for a reasonable price.

I always wanted to have some nice ASCII or ANSI printed on a shirt so I showed them a few ASCIIs and asked them, if they could do it. I am not an expert in this kind of stuff, but it turned out that block ASCII was actually very hard for them to do, because they convert the image to vector graphics first and use that pattern when they do the actual print. They said that the creation of that vector pattern will take forever, because it has to break down all the individual lines. And there are a lot of lines in Block ASCII hehe.

I agreed for the higher price tag, if I can get in return the vector file, which will allow me to do additional copies fairly easy without spending a lot of money. They agreed and said that it will take a while and that it will be impossible to do it right there at the conference and be done the same day. No problem, the conference was still on for another two days so I agreed to give them time until the last day of the show.

The Results
... were pretty amazing. I had them make me two t-shirts, one with a SAC ASCII logo by Hetero and another one with my own Dytec ASCII logo. Here are two photos showing me wearing the t-shirts. The Dytec logo color is a gray, like the original font color in MS DOS. The SAC logo is in bright and shiny white.

Below each photo is a link to the original ASCII art piece on my website for comparison.


See original ASCII


See original ASCII
Pretty cool eh? I was thinking about creating some more t-shirts and may be sell them off my site, but I don't know if there is any interest in that kind of stuff. If you are interested, leave a comment here at my blog to let me know. If enough people are interested, I will consider it. If you can't wait and would like to get the same t-shirts, which I am wearing in those pictures, read the next paragraph.

A Little Gift
I was thinking about it and said to myself "what the heck!". Here are the vectorized versions of the two ASCIIs, which were used for the prints and were the most time consuming and expensive part of the whole process. I zipped them up and the file is about 2 MB in size. The file format is ".ai" whatever that might be, but the shop I used for the prints is able to use them and print additional t-shirts very easily and cheap, because they can load it right into their printing machine without any pre-processing.

ASCII-VectorImages-Print.zip

You can thank me for it by linking to RoySAC.com, making a donation (see any of my arts detail pages) or buying some of my mouse pads or something like that. I nice thank you and a drink (if we ever get a chance to meet in person) will also do I guess hehe.

Where Can You Get Something Like This?
The shop that did the t-shirts also does other types of custom prints. I was asked a few times where you could get ANSI art as a poster or large picture to hang it on to your wall. Here is the answer to that question: custom print. It is not cheap, but it also does not cost an arm and a leg. You also have to worry about a frame. You might want to ask them if they would take care of the framing for you. Keep in mind that a framed picture is harder to ship and would increase the cost for that.

I can recommend the print shop that did the t-shirts for me, it is called LBGFX Solutions. You can visit their website at LBGFX.com. They are located in National City in California. You can also contact the owner directly via email. His name is Liz Dela Cruz and his email is lizdcruz at gmail dot com. Tell them that I recommended him. He will not remember my name, just tell him "the guy with the ASCII prints at DefCon 15" and he will remember :).

Another print shop I know who does this kind of print and also understands what you are talking about if you ask for an "ANSI" to get printed are the guys from ShadowVex for whom I created the custom DefCon ANSI. They are located in Oregon and their website is more or less under construction and promotes their DJ'ing and not their custom printing. They organized the sound and music for one of the official DefCon parties btw. and they do sell t-shirts and a lot of other custom printed merchandizing for DefCon at the conference for over 10 years now. I talked with them about the need of a website and maybe some ecommerce features while I was in Vegas. It is on their to-do list. In the meantime is the best way to contact them via email. The name of the guy is Kevin Whitesmith and his email is Kevin at shadowvex dot com. Say "Hi" from me, if you decide to email him.

Cheaper Alternatives
For simpler prints do you not have to get fancy. I used deviantART for some stuff, like my ASCII and ANSI mouse pads and postcards. I blogged about them last November in greater detail.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Buy ANSI Print	Buy ASCII Print

Another alternative for this kind of stuff would also be CafePress. They also do t-shirts, but be careful and keep in mind that the quality of those t-shirts is probably not getting even close to the quality print done by a professional custom print shop.

Good luck and happy printing :). Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

New ASCII and ANSI Art Galleries

When I added the SAC section to my site and new galleries with ASCII, ANSI and pixel art that were not created by me, did I say to myself "why not add other great art to the site as well".

Neo Tokyo ANSI by Somms/ACiD

I was also inspired by Sixteencolors.net who did an amazing job of making ANSI art available to look at on the web.

Razor 1911 ANSI by Zebig/Razor 1911

I don't want to create a file archive where you can find a lot of art, but have to download it first and use special software to be able to look at it. Jason Scott over at Textfiles.com is doing a great job doing that.


The new galleries are only the beginning. More will come over time.

Okay check out the new ASCII Art Gallery and the new ANSI Art Gallery.

ASCII Skull - taken from the
Night Rising World ASCII by Olli/Black Maiden

Famous Che Guevara head shot.
Taken from the MIM NFO ASCII by m0/Chemical Reactions

New Gallery Feature
You will notice in detail page of the ASCII art pieces new buttons in the top left: "Snapshot Image", "Text Version" and "Original (DL)".

Razor 1911 NFO file logo by JED/ACiD

"Snapshot Image" is the default display mode. The ASCIIs (and ANSIs) are converted with a tool called PHP AnsiLove to a PNG image. This happens in real time based on the original ASCII or ANSI file. The result is very close to the looks of the text art in MS DOS.

"Text Version" is what it says, the real text version of the ASCII. I wrote a converter to convert ASCIIs to Unicode. The font used is "Lucida Console" for the display on the web.

I am not sure if looks right on all systems and browsers, which is the reason that I did not make it the default display option.

I want to write a converter for ANSI as well, which converts the ANSI.sys "escape codes" to HTML. It is not done yet, thus no buttons are available in the details of the ANSIs yet.

Avatar FTP Site Advert by Darrix

"Original (DL)" was there all the time. It is also available at the bottom of the page for ANSIs. It is the option to download the original .ASC or .ANS file to your local hard drive.

I hope you will like those new additions to the site. Feel free to leave any comments and suggestions here at my blog.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Welcome to the ASCII Art Videos

I added a new page to my site, which is dedicated to show videos that are about or related to text art and the subject that surrounds it, including the BBS scene, the demoscene and of course SAC, Superior Art Creations.

Visit the new ASCII Art Videos Section at RoySAC.com/videos/.

The section launched with 10 videos.

The first one is "The Art of Textmode" - Text Art History, a presentation at the Assembly 2004 Demo party in Helsinki, Finland by Christian Wirth aka RaD Man. I referred to that video earlier already in a blog post of mine from February and decided to put it somewhere on the site where it can be found more easily.

The second one is a short video by Creature of Hell/SAC - The Movie from 2001, showing off some of his pixel art skills.

The main part of the section is made up by the six videos, which represent the complete content of Jason Scott's 3 DVD long documentary titled "BBS - The Documentary". No, it's not an illegal copy of the DVD's. Jason put them up himself on Google Video, because he released the documentary under the creative commons licensing model to make its content easier accessible. Jason does of course appreciate support for his cause(s), which are surrounding the subject of BBS and actually were the triggers for him to create the documentary in the first place. You can support him via buying the real DVDs, pressed, not burned, with nice wrapping and paper box for example. You can get it via his website here or from Amazon.com, if you prefer them for any reasons.



Then I also put up two good examples of ASCIImation, which means animated ASCII or ASCII animation. The examples show two songs by more or less famous musicians who used ASCIImation for their music videos.

More videos will be added over time, especially videos of the old SACtros and cracktros the group did for others and which can not be started and watched on modern PCs without emulation of the old MS DOS operating system.

Btw. I extended the SAC section of RoySAC.com a little bit as well. I added more content and also found two music-disks that were released by SAC members when I was not part of the group anymore. I found them by accident and put them up on my site of course. :)

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Major Site Expansion and New SAC Section with Art Packs Page

I spent quite some time to update content at my RoySAC.com Website. I wrote a whole ASCII art primer article to give you an idea what I am talking about in general. It is for people who do know little or nothing about ASCII/ANSI art, the artscene and the warez scene it operated in.

The biggest addition is the new SAC section, which is dedicated solely to everything related to Superior Art Creations, the art group, which I founded in 1994.

You can find there SAC VGA logos created by SAC members for the group, as well as ANSI logos and ASCII logos, which were created for internal purposes of the group.

The largest addition overall was the new SAC art packs releases page. It shows all 34 SAC art packs, which were released betweeen December 1994 and December 2005, the packs File_ID.diz, download links to the pack files, links to the SAC.NFO files for detailed information about each pack and a brief description for every release.

The descriptions are more detailed than I had originally planned. Because of that, does the page act as SAC history page for now, until a better SAC history page is being created one day. There are some "holes" in it, but I hope to get the missing information and will then update the page accordingly.

I updated pretty much every page of the site, including the home page, the Roy/SAC art page, the shop, the downloads section, the links page and the gallery pages (ASCII Art, ANSI Art, Best Of and VGA Art). The Website navigation was overhauled and has now a much slicker look than before. Here is a partial screen shot of how the navigation of the site looks today.



I hope you will enjoy the "renovated" and massive expanded RoySAC.com site. Let me know what you think about it, negative feedback is as welcome as possitive.

Thank you and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Nude Girls in ASCII - Even More Naked Truth

I realized 2 days after my post about the 30 years of naked ASCII art that the gallery was not working with Firefox and Safari.

No wonder that it died at Digg before it even started. I would be glad, if you could revive it by digging it, if you happen to have a Digg account. Thanks. Much appreciated.

I fixed the Gallery and tested it with Firefox 2.0 and Safari for Windows. It works fine now. While I was at it, did I extend the gallery from 20 to 30 pieces of art.

I also did significantly improve the interface. I am now showing little thumbnails for the picture selection and also added a little "fading" effect if you hover over a picture, which works for IE and Firefox (not for Safari, sorry).

       d@$iWWb:
     '8$$$$#$$$k
     '8$$$$ `$$M&
     X$$$$K  `$$XX
     $$$$$UUo$@$$$.
    9$$$$$$$$$9$$$$>
   W$$$$$$$$P `#$$?B
  '$$$$$"#$h. d$$$X?$c
   $$$$R      /"$$$X$$
   ?$$$R~    :/ $$R"""\.
    $$$$:  .xHH9$E      !
   '$"9$$N    d$$F       !
   '  M$$$'Ne@$$$!'      '
   E  XR#$>'R P9?  k>     :
   E   '! *f  .f'  :      9k               -~`      `"-.
   `  :    `    >   >     ~$:          .~                `!.
   'L :     ~` ~    !     '$8       .~                        ~\.
    ?         ~   ! .      $$$.    :                             `~:
    `!        '   %X2      R$$W% .~                                  `\
     !:  MM>  FL     :     M5$$ ~   !                                   `.
     !$W.   xF  #buo@$     '^$F   :$$>       .--^`"-.  `.
     !M$$$$*         'k    '     d$*##..-~`           `: "4:x.       `"#5    \.
     '!$$$$$c   !. !xx!     .!  `$$@F`                  >~
     '\!?$$$$$X.     `M   9 !     ~
     '!!!> ~ `!!~!!.  f     ~ ~

A simple click on the current image also closes it and pushes the image selection up and into the center of the screen. So you don't have to scroll all the way to the end of the picture anymore. I also reduced the size of the standard website navigation to the minimum.

A lot of enhancements and extensions. A lot more reasons to check out my ASCII Nudes Collection.



This is a screen shot of the new image selection. Neat eh?
Enjoy!


Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCII Nudes Collection - 30 Years of Naked ASCII Art

I was going through some of my ASCIIs in my vast archive and found a number of "interesting" pieces. Who said that ASCII text art is boring?

Guess what, its actually pretty exciting at times. You have probably not seen some of the great pieces of nude ASCII art yet. Luckily for you did I spend the time to collect the best pieces of Nude ASCII art available from around the world and over 30 years.

I created a special page for it on my site. The collection consists of 20 pieces of the finest nude ASCII text art showing naked girls. Some of the pieces are surprisingly realistic.

I am proud to be able to present them to you here and now. You can choose between the display with white background and black font (default) to emulate the look under Windows (like with Notepad) or black background with white font (invert), which emulates the original DOS to some degree (Note: MS DOS did not have a white font as default. It was a light gray, but who is checking? hehe)

Special "Boss Key" Feature
Remember the old days where some programs had a "Boss Key" feature that switched from whatever you were doing to something totaly innocent if you clicked it?

It came in handy when your parents or your parents "other" child entered the room to check what you are doing. Guess what, the "Boss Key" is back :).

You will notice the "Boss Key" to the top right when you open the gallery page. It will stay with you, even if you scroll to look at the ASCIIs. Click it and the page will turn from Rated:R to Rated:G in an instant. The Button will change to "Home", just click it again when everything is safe again and continue where you left off :).

Where is the link? Okay, here it is.

ASCII Nudes Collection - 30 Years of "Naked" ASCII art

One Example

And to show you that I am not kidding, I will show you one of the 20 pieces to demonstrate what I am referring to. Remember, there are 19 more, where that one came from hehe. Voila, "Miss MORGANA". :)

               
           .:IIIIHIHHIHHHII::I:.
         .IIIIHIHHHHHHIHIIIIMHHI:, 
       :IIIIHIHHHHHHMMHHIHHIIHHIII:. 
     .:IHIHHHHHHHHHHHHHIHIHHIHHHIH:I:, 
    ,.:HIHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIHIHHII:. 
   ,.:IHHHHHHHHHHMMMMHHHHHHHIIHHHIHIII, 
  .:IIHHHHHHHHMMMMMHHHHMMMHHMHHHIIIHIIII: 
  .IIHHHMMMMMMMHHMMMHHHMMMHHMHII:HHHII:I. 
  :HIHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHHII:HHMMHII:II 
 :HHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHIIHIHHMMHHHHII::I: 
:IIHHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMHMMHIHMMMMHHHI:"::IIHII: 
:IHHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMHHI:II::I:"' .   '"IHH. 
::HHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMHMHHI:II::.'  .       'VMA. 
IHHHHHMHNMMMMMMMMHMHHI:II:. . .          "MMH. 
HHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMHMHI:I::.' .  . .      .,MMM:. 
HHHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMHMHI:II:. ..  .    ..LI:"IMMI.
HMHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHI:II.'.        :HT;.,, VHI: 
HHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMHMHHHI:HMHII:,.   ':,MHP"HPIHII. 
IHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMHMHHHII::IT:.I:.  'HMMH ,:" VII: 
:HHHHHHHMHMMMMMHMHHHHIIMMMPVHI::. .P"TIT"'  IH:I 
HHIHHHHHHMHMMMMHMHHHHH:VMMM:.HI:H:. :. . . . II:I. 
:HHHHHMHMMMMMHMHHHHIIHMMHHI:.:HI:. . .. .  :III; 
IHHHHMHMMMMMMMHHHHHI:IT:TI:..:HI:.. ..:. . :IHII 
 IHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMHHI:I::.:. ..:II::.. :I..  :HIIH. 
 'HHHMHMMMMMHMHHHH:II:.. ...:II:II./'::.' IHHIH; 
  HHMHMMMMMMMHMHHHH:I:I::....::VIHI;, ' . . IHHIHA 
  MHHMMMMMMMMMHMHHH:II:::...::II:::.;,,,:   AHHIHH; 
  ;HHMHMMMMMMMMHMHH-:II::..:::I::"",,:"''  .HHHIHHI. 
  'HHHMHMMMMMMMMHMHHA:II:.:H.::-"'""' ,'. .AMHHIHHH; 
   :HHMHMMMMMMMMMMHMHA:II::.::::-;,,:: .. :AMHI:IHHI 
   'HHMHMMMMMMMMMMHMHHA:III:::II:II::. . .AMMHI:IHHH. 
    :HHHMHMMMMMMMMMHMHHA:IIIHII:.:::. . .AMMMHI:IHHH:. 
    'HHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHI:":VIII::...:AMMMMHHI:IHHHI
     ;IHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHII:. '"" 'AMMMMMMMHI:IIHHH:I. 
     :IMHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHII:.  .:IHMMMMMMHHHIHIHHHI::. 
     ;HHHMHMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHI:..IHHMHMMHHHHHIHHHMHH;I:".' 
     ;HHHHHMHMMMMMNMMMMMMMHMHHHI::.HHHHMMHHHHHIHIHHHHHI:' 
     :HHHHHHHHMHMMMMMMMMMHHHMHHHI:IHHMHMMHHHHHMHIHHHHIHI; 
     ;HHHHHHHHMMHMMMMMHMHHMMHIHMI:IIHHHMHHHHMHMHIHIHHHHI:. 
     IHHHHHHHHHHMHMMMMMHMHHMMHHMMII:IHHMMHMHHHHMMHMHMHHHH; 
     ;HH:":IHHHHMHMMMMMHMHIHMHIIMMHI:IMHMMMI:HHHHHMMHHHHI:I. 
    ;HV" . .:IIHHHMMMMMMMHHHMMHIIHMHHI:HHHMHI:IHHIHHIHHMHI:II;. 
   ;IV"   . .''":VMMMMMMHMHHHMMHI:HHHHI:HHHIHI:IHHHHHIHHHIHII;, 
   .II"   .. .  ':VHHHMHMMMMMHMHHI:HMMHI:IHHHI::IHHHI:HIHHHI:I:. 
  .II . . .  . .  ':HHHHMHMMMHMMMHIHIMMMHI:HHHMI:IHHHIHI:HHHHII:I. 
 .;V' . .. .  .    'IHMMMHHMHHHMMMHIHIHHHHI:IHHHI:IHHHHHIHHHHHIIHII:. 
.:I" .. . .    .   :IHMMMHHHMHHIHHHI:HHIHHHIHIHHHAIHHHHHHI:HHHIHII:. 
'..:  .  .       .  :IMMMHMHHIMHIIHHI:IHHI:IHHIHHHHIHIHHHHIHIHHHHIHI:. 
.: .. . . .      ..:IHMMMHMHMHMHHHHMHIHHI:.IVIIHHHIHHHHHHHHI:HIHHIHII:. 
.: .   . .        . :IHMMMHMIHIH:IIHHHIHH:.I:IIHHHIHHHHHHHHIHI:IHHHI:;.
:: .:. .  .   .   ..:IHHMMMHMIHIH:IIHHHMHH::..:HHHHI:HHHHHHI:I:IIIHII; 
:. ... . .  .     ..::HHHMMHMHHII:HIIHHMMHH:..:HHHMHHIHHHI:: . :IHII:I 
..  ..  .   .      ..:IHHHMMMMHIII:HIHMMMHHI:. HHMHMMHHII:'  '.:IHII:" 
':....   . .      . ..:IHHHMMMMHMHI:HIHMMMHA...VHMMHHHMI:'  .' :IH::" 
 :. ..  ....    .    ..IHHHHMMMMHHII:I:IHMMHA. .VHMHHHI:' ''    '':, 
 ::...  . .... .   . ..::IHHHMMMMIHII::I:IHMMHHMHIHIHI''   .  .     , 
 ::.... . .....  ..  ...::IIIHHHMMIHI::IHHHIIIHHHIIHI".  ..   .      , 
 ::.:.......... .. . ....:::HHIIHHHHHHHIIHMMMHI:' 'VI::..  . .        , 
 ::.:............. .. . ...AHIHIIIIIHHHI::""'      'VII:.. ..    .      
 ::.:.:.......... .. .  ...HHHIIIIIIHHHI::. .       'VII::. . .       , 
 ':::.:.:..... .. . . . ..:MHHIHIIIII:I::. .         'VII:::. ..      . 
  :::::.:..:.... . . . ...AHHHHIHIIII:::. .           'VII:::. . .   :. 
  :::::::.:..... .. . ....MHHHHHIHIII::.:.. .          'VII::.  .   :: 
  :::::::::.:.... .. ....:MHHHHIHII:I::::...  .         'VI::. .   ::I) 
  '::::::::::.:... .. ...:MHHHHIHIIII::::..  .           'VI:.    ...:V 
   .:::::::::::.:.... . .AMMHHIHIII:I::::...  .  .        I::.   ...:-" 
   :.::I::::::::.:. .  ..MMMHHIHIIII:I:::... .  .        .::.  ,..-"
   :..:II:I:::::.:.. . ..MMMHHIHIIIIIII:I::.... .  .    ..::""' 
  .::.:III:I::::::.:.. ..MMMMIVHIHIIIII:I::::.... .   .....:, 
.:.::..:III:I:::::.:... .MMHMAIVHHIHIIIII:I::::.. .  ..::..:, 
. .:::.::III:I::::.:... .VMMHMAIVHHHIHIIII:I::::..  ..:...::: 
. :::I.:::III:I:::.::.. .:MMHHMAIVHHIHIIIII:I::::....:::.:::: 
 .::IIH.:::III:I::::.:.. .MMHMHMAIVHHHIHIIIIII:I:::.:::::::I) 
.::IIHH.II:::II:I::::.:...MMMHMHMAIVHHHHHIHII:I:::..::::::HV 
::IIIHIH.III::I:I::::.:. .MHHMHHHIAIIVHHHHIHIII:...::::.:-" 
:IIHIHHA.VIHII:I:::::::...HHHHHHIHI::":VHHHII:I:::...:-' 
IIHIHHHHI.HHIHII:I:::::...HHHIHII:' .  .'"VIIIII::-' 
IHIHHHHH-:HHIHIIII:I::.:..HIHI::. ..  ...:" 
HIHHHHIHHH:HHHIHIIII:I::.:HII:'. .   ..:" 
HHHHHHMHHHIHHHHHHIHIII::.IHI:.  .    ..:-., 
HHHHHHHMHHIHHHHHHHIHII:..II:'  .    .:"    ''"-. 
HHHHHHHMHHIHHHHHHIHII::..I;'. .   ..:"          '"-. 
HHHHHHHMHIHHHHHHHHIHI::,.I;' . .   .;"              "- . 
MMHMHHHHHH-IHHHHHHIHII::.::;.   :.:;.... .             '"-.
MMMHMHHHHHHIHHHHHHIHII::..:.,  .N.:I::.... .               '"-. 
MMMMHMHHHHHIHHHHHHIHIII:..:.;. :.:AI:::..... .  .             .'-. 
MMMMMHMHHHIHHHHHHHHHIHII:..:.;:.:AIII::::....... .               .':, 
MMMMHMHHHHIHHHHHHHHHHIH:I:.:.,::AHIHIII:I::::::::...... .    .  ...::, 
MMMHMHHHHHIHVHHHHHHHHHIII::.:.:AHHIHIHIIIII:I:::::::.:....... .. ...::. 
MHMHHHIHIIII:HHHHHHHIHII:I:. :AHHHHHHHHHHHIHIIHIIIIIII:I::.:..... ..::. 
HHHHIHIIII:I:HHHHHHHHIHII:: .IHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIIHIII:I::::::::::::. 
HHIHIIIII:I::VHHHHHHHIHII::. :MHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIHIIHIIIIIIIIIIIV 
HHIHIIII:I::::MHHHHHHHIII::.. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHHHHIIHIIIHIIIV' 
HHHIHII:I::I::MHHHHHHIHIII:: .HHIHHHHHIHHHHHHHHIHHIHHHIHHHHIHHIHIHHV' 
HHHHIHII:I::::HHHHHHHIHII:I:. MHHHIHHHHHHHIHHHHHHIHHHHHHHIHHHHHHHHV' 
MMHHHIHIII:I::HHHHHHHHIHIII: .:MMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHV:' 
II:IHMHHI::::AIHHHHHHHHHIII::. MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHMHHHHHHHV:' 
III:IHMHIAMMMIHHHHHHHHHIHII....MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM--"""'' 
IIIII:I:IIHMMMMMHHHHHHHHHHHII:::"""""""""""""'' 
IIIII:I:II:.T,  'VHHHHHHHHIHI::: 
IIIHIII:I:::.:,  :HHHHHHHHHHIHII
IIIIII:I::::::.,  VHHHHHHHHHHIHI 
IIHII:I::::.:..., 'MMMHMHHHHHIHI. 
IIII:I:::::.:....:.VMMMHMHHHHHIH. 
IIIIII:I::::::.:..:.MMMMMHMHHHHH: 
IHIIIIII:II::::.:.:.VMMMMMHMHHHHA. 
IIIHIIIHIII:I::::.:..VMMMMMHMHHHHA 
IIIIIHIIIIIII:I:::.:..VMMMMHMMHHHH.         Miss MORGANA
IIHIIIIIIHIIIII:I:::..IMMMMMMMHMHHI 
HIIIIIHIIIIIIIII:I:.:..VMMMMMHMHHI:. 
HIHIIIIHIIIIIHIHI:I::..IMMMMHMHIHI:. 
HHIHIIIIIIHIIIIHIHIII:.:MMMMMHMHHI:: 
HHHIHHHHHHIIIIIIHHHHIHI:MMMMMHMHHII: 
HHHHIHIIIHIIIIHIHHHHHHHI..HHHIHIIHI:. 
HHHHHHIHIIIIIIIIIHIHH..IHHHHIHI:III:, 
HMHHHHHIHIIIIIIIIIHIHMHHIIHIIHI:II:::, 
MMHHHHHHHHIHIIIIIIIHMIHIIHHIIIHI:I::.., 
MHMHMHHHHHHHHHIHIIH.;I:IIIHHIIHHI:::::.,
MMMMMHMHHHHHHHHIHIH;I:IHIHII:HI:HII::.::. 
MMMMMMMMHMHHHHHHHIH;I:IHMHI.:HIIHI:II:IHA 
HMMMMMMMMMHMHHHHHHVI::IMHIHHHMH:IH::I:IHH. 
HHHMMMMMMMMMMHMHH;I:HHIMHHHHMHHIHHI.:AMHI:
HHHHMMMHHHHMMMMM;I:IIHHIIHAIIIHI:HI:HA:IHI
HIHHHHMMMHHHMMM:II:IMHHIIMIHIIIHIHHIHMMH.I

Enjoy!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Text Art Google Group

I created today a Google Group titled "ASCII and ANSI Text Art", but it is open to anything and anybody who and which is related to Text Art.

For that reason is the short name and URL to the group "textart" instead of "asciiart" or "ansiart".

ASCII and ANSI text art Visit this group

Subscribe to ASCII and ANSI text art Email: Visit this group

Those templates were provided by Google hehe.

I created already a little resources page and also started a discussion about something that has always been a controversy. I will not tell you what that is, go check out the group and find out for yourself.

A number of XML feeds are also available for anybody who can not live without.

	Atom 1.0 15 New messages 50 New messages 15 New topics 50 New topics		RSS 2.0 15 New messages 50 New messages 15 New topics 50 New topics

Lets see how it goes. Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Image to Text Converter and Fun with Matt Cutts

I came across a nice free tool that converts images to ASCII. It is called Photo2Text.com and produces very decent results. I have looked at a bunch of such converters since the early nineties and the results can vary a lot, depending on the quality of the algorithm that has to decide which text character is the best to get it as close to the original as it possibly can.

I was never a fan on image to text converters. Mostly because those converters were and are often used by guys who are cheats and try to "sell" converted images as their own creation, as in made from scratch and by hand. Real pieces of ASCII art are being created without the use of any special tools other than editors that allow to assign text characters to specific keys on the keyboard and let you easier move around to change individual characters ("insert" off and the ability to move with the cursor to the right without the need to create "spaces" manually first). A number of different tools are available for download at my site.

Anyhow, I take the converters as what they are, a nice tool to have fun with, nothing serious. Nothing is wrong with good old fashioned fun. The only person who is serious about it, is the coder who spent his time figuring out how to produce the best possible result.

To demonstrate the quality of the Photo2Text.com converter, did I use an image of the Google engineer Matt Cutts, who has a blog where he talks to webmasters about SEO and search engine spam (and his pet, a cat). I had my arguments with him a bunch of times, so it just right for me to use him as guinea pig and demonstration object hehe.

You can see the GIF image of him, which I used to the right. I optimized it a bit to increase the contrast for better result. I also made sure that there is not too much going on, like stuff in the background, which would overload the picture and harder to get an ASCII back where you can identify anything.

The tool lets you choose from eight different character sets to be used for the converted image.

Set 1:  @#MBHA&Gh93X25Sisr;:,.
Set 2:  @#MBHA&Gh93X25Sisr;:,.__
Set 3:  #WMBRXVYIti+=;:,.
Set 4:  #Xx+=-;,.
Set 5:  @%#*+=-:.
Set 6:  #¥®Ø$ø0o°+=-,.
Set 7:  01
Set 8:  █▓▒░

An interesting and rare feature is the "slider" to adjust the image's "brightness". It is more than just a gimick and you should play around with it, because it can improve results significantly if you increase or decrease it, depending on the original image.

Also nice, the option to save the final ASCII to your computer. Okay, lets have a look at the results for the Matt Cutts image.

First Version using Character Set: @#MBHA&Gh93X25Sisr;:,.

I used the default "brightness", which is a bit darker. For that reason is the face also filled with characters.

                                ..,ri52G@@HXX2i;::;:                                    
                            rAr;@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@#i,                               
                       ,iH@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@Mr                            
                    .r@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@s.                        
                 .i#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@;                      
               ,h@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@r                    
             .s@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@r                  
            .2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@2                
            X@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@,              
          :#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@S             
        :#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@X            
       3@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@r           
      s@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@H           
      &@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@;          
      H@@@@@HG#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@A          
      A@@@@G2i9@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@.         
      ,@@@Gi552#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@;         
       s@Bri22SG@@@M#@@@#@@@@@@@#@##@@@@@@##MM##@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@s         
       s@5iXX2S5h#@@@@@@#@@@@@@@####@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@3         
       i@S39X55ss5G#@###@@GH@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@H         
       r@299X2Siiir;r;;;sii;,:iXA@@@@@@@@@@#952A@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@M         
       ;#299XX2225issrrr;::;;,   ;h2;rrs2Xisrr2A##@@@@M@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@2         
       ,Ah3XXXX52225isiSiiiiSisr:,,,,:::::rsiSih##M@@@#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@r         
       .3AXXXXX25522iiSiSissrsSs;::;;rsrrsii22i3@@#@@@#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@G          
        5G522XX2iSX5i55iis;;;;rr;;rsss55sSXSiS22H@@#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@s          
       :hX2SsiSisi52Sii5rr;;;r;;rrSi55555Siiii52&#@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@H,          
      .GMA3Siisiiii5Siisrr;;;rrrrrsi52552SSSSS522B@@M#@@@###@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@#,          
     ;@@@#XSS5iisriisr;ssrsrrsssrrri2252X5555SSSrX@@###@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@h           
 ;r;X@@@@@@M#BG5iirsirrs2iSSsisr;:rsiS55225SSiiSssS&@@@##@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@r           
.@@#; ,A@@@@@@@H9&32&h3XX2S5SSXh3irssi52XX5S25522SiSG@@@@@@#@@@@@@M2ssSXA@@M,           
  H;   ;#@@@A#@@@#95G@@@@@@@@#@@##AAAhh2SXX22iSSSX3X&@@@@@@@@@A2Sr:;sisS5h@5            
  s;.  ,hH@#hXA@@@#&9G9&B@@@@@@@@@@@#M##AX3hX3hHHM#M#@@@@@@@@9:.:sSSi52Ss2Bs            
   s:  iA3G&B#@@@3S5A#5ri2SA@@@@@M##@@#@@@@#HAGX222S5B@@@@#@@5;i2; :r2G5s2@A            
   ;2,,3AGG&AG9@ASs;sH@@&2X&###A322H@h3AAXr;;;;rsiSSi2M##@#@M33BArsXSSG3rh@B            
    ,ihAHAh&h223XisisS23922hBBAh32i23r;s;;;;;::rS52X22H@@@@@AhHMGr;XXiGXs@@             
     ;#AXX2X29GXisSirri22ssS2XXX2S53irrsiisrr;rS2523X2XBHA##hiX3; :iSi2i#@;             
     rA2522553X5i5X2isrri22555XhhX5SrsissiissiS222XXXX22X9AHhsS2:;S5S2rA@i              
     SM22252XAh22X33X25irrsiSiiiisr;;rrrrriiS25XXXX3hXXhGAHB&2hAXA3S2rX@r               
     5B225S2GX2i55XG&A&9SiiSisrrrrssssrrsiiS22X33XXXXX9h&AMMA3i;;SA3s9@3                
     2M2X5S2XS;;iS5XXXhhX22XXisiiiiiiiiSSSS52222XX22XXX3AAH#H9i;;riiH@h                 
     SBXX2Xh35SXX225SiXAG22X25Siiii55522Sii5S52223XX93X9G&B#Xr2352iX@2                  
     r#BA&M@@#HAA&M#AAH&2sS2Siiiiii222222Sii5SS529G9399&hHM#3;;S39#@A                   
     .3#M#@@@@@M@@@@@HXiiiisiissrii5255552SS2X293hh2XGA&ABMB@#&A#@@h                    
      :@#H###@MM@###HAAXX25SSSisriis5555SS522X3hh&hhGGAAABMM@@HB@#:                     
      :##&HAG9#@@Ah9GAA&&G&hG&3XSiiiiS5225523X9h93XXG&AAAB###BGA@h                      
      ,A@#MHAX522is2&AB#BGHHGAG22sssS5S522233999X393GA&BMHH##H&H@M                      
       rBHH#@@@#MA9939ABBMMBAAA9XSssi5SSS523X3h99GG&AAAHBHB#MBHH@@                      
       ,@B9hA&HM@@@@#&&AHHH##&A#AiiSiii525239hh99&AAAHHHHMMMBBB#@@                      
       :@@MA9Xi2AHG3XX3G&5rSG&G&92isiS522Xh9339hG&AABHAAHMMMHHM#@@                      
       ,@@@M##AAA&&&&HAhisiii3HA9X52222XXX9&hhG3&HAHAAHABBHBHAM#@@                      
        r@@#M@@@@@@#BA33XXGh9&B@#9hG923h933399&AAAABHAHHBBMHBBB#@@                      
         r@@AGH####BA3X52ABMBAM@#AA9GGhG93XXhh9AAGAHAA#MBMMAB##@@@                      
          H@#HG9G32X3X5SS9BABMB###GhhGh223X3hhGG&AHAHHBBBHAAM##@@#                      
          ;#@@A9&AA&h39hhhBBAHHHM#Ah333XX9X99AAAAAAHHHAHHAHHM##@@#                      
           B@@#A&B#H9XAHBGABHAAH#B&3XXhGhh99&AAAAAHBHAAA&&HHM#BB@&                      
           ,#@@@BB#HhAA#@BHBM@@@@@AXhGh&AAA&AHAAABHAHAA&&ABHBMMh2G:                     
             X@@@@@@@###@@@@@@@@@#&XGGGG&HHAAAAAAAA&AGGGG&AAHBAXsSs.                    
               sB@@@@@@@@@@@@#B&X2XG&&AGGHHABB&AAA&&G3GAG3ABA&XS5s;                     
                 :BH#@@#BAGX2SSX3XG&AAGAA&AAAAG&&&9hGXX99G&BMAXSs;.                     
                  .5S2GM##MAhAHAAAHHHAAHA&AA&GAAhh9X3993XG9&BG2i;.                      
                  .9Xr;ri&#@@@@BB#MMHA&&AAGG&AAh39hXX3X333GAG2r;.                       
                  :hh3ir;;ri&#@@@#BAHAGAAAA&hhh9XX222XX9h9Ahs,.                         
                  ;XXA35srr;rrS9ABMHBAG&&h332S2X25X22XX9h&9S,                           
                  ,si239X5ir;rsii5239X2X2SSS55iSSSS2X39GG3X;.                           
                     :i2XX5irrrsiisiSiiiiiii55555Si23992sr:,                            
                      :sri55isrrssiiiiSSiS522222i53225ir:                               
                       .;r;rSSisrrsiiiiSSS5255225S2Sssr;.                               
                         ,;;rsiSsrrrsssssssiisiSSsrsis,                                 
                           .,:;sssssrssrsssssrssssir,.

Now a different version using the

Block ASCII Character Set: █▓▒░

I also increased the "brightness" so that the face does not require as much characters. It makes it look much cleaner IMO.

                                   ░░                                              
                                ▒████████████████████▓                                  
                          ▒███████████████████████████████                              
                      ░██████████████████████████████████████░                          
                    ████████████████████████████████████████████░                       
                 █████████████████████████████████████████████████▓                     
               ▓████████████████████████████████████████████████████▓                   
              ▓███████████████████████████████████████████████████████▓                 
             ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▒               
            ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████              
          ███████████████████████████████████████████████▓█████████████████             
        ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████            
       █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▓███████            
       ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████           
       █████▒░▓██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████           
       ████▒  ░█████████████████████████▓█████████████████████████▓██████████▓          
       ▓██░    ▓██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████          
        █▒  ░  ▒███▓▓███▓███████▓▓▓▓██████▓▓▓▓▓▓██████████████████████████████          
        █  ░░   ░▓██████▓▓█████▓▓▓▓▓▓▓███████████████▓▓████████████████▓██████          
        █ ░░░     ▒▓█▓▓▓██░▒▓█████████████████████████████████████████████████░         
        ▓ ░░░░                 ░▒█████████▓▓░  ▒▓█████████████████████████████░         
        ▒ ░░░░░                   ░      ░     ▒▓▓█▓██▓███████████████████████          
        ░░░░░░░                                ░▓▓▓███▓▓██████████████████████          
         ▒░░░░░░  ░                            ░▓█▓███▓██████████████████████░          
         ░ ░ ░░   ░                       ░     ▒██▓█████████████████████████           
                                               ░▒▓██████████████████████████▒           
        ▒▒░                                      ▓██▓▓▓██▓▓▓████████████████▒           
      ▒██▓░                            ░░        ░██▓▓▓▓████████████████████            
     ▒█████▓▓▒░                         ░          ▒███▓▓██████████████████▓            
 ░█░   ░███████▒░▒░ ░░░        ░        ░░     ░░   ▒▓█████▓██████▓    ░▒██▒            
        ▓███▒▓▓██▓░ ░▓███████▓▓█▓▓▒▒▒░░░ ░░      ░░░▒█████████▒          ░▓             
        ░▒█▓░░▒███▓▒░░░▒▓██████████▓▓▓▓▓▒░░░░░░▒▒▓▓▓▓████████░            ▒             
        ▒░░▒▓▓███░  ▒▓     ▒█████▓▓▓██▓████▓▒▒░░     ▓████▓██         ▒   ▓             
        ▒░░▒▒░░▓▒    ▒██▒ ░▒▓▓▓▒░ ░▒█░░▒▒░            ▓▓▓█▓█▓░░▒▒     ▒░ ░█░            
       ▒▒▒░▒░ ░░░     ░░░  ░▒▓▒░░   ░              ░  ▒█████▒░▒▓░     ▒░ █▓             
      ▒░░░ ░ ░░░             ░░░░  ░               ░░ ░▒▒▒▓▓░ ░░        ▓█              
      ░      ░░   ░           ░░░░                ░░░░░ ░░▒▒░          ▒█               
      ▒     ░▒░  ░░░░                          ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒ ░░ ░░   ░█                
      ▒ ░  ░░░    ░▒▒▒▒░                      ░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▓▓▒░    ▒░ ░█                 
      ▒ ░   ░      ░░░░░░  ░░                 ░ ░░  ░░░░▒▒▒▓▒░      ▒█░                 
      ▒░░ ░░░  ░░░░   ░▒░░ ░░                   ░░░░░░░░▒▒▓▓░  ░   ░█                   
      ▒▒▒▒▓██▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒▒                        ░░░░░░░▒░▒▓▓░   ░░▓█░                   
       ▓▓▓█████▓█████▒░                      ░ ░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓░▒▓██░                    
       ▓▓▒▓▓▓█▓▓█▓▓▓▒▒▒░░                    ░░░░▒░░▒░▒▒▒▒▓▓█▓▒▓█▓                      
       ▒▓▒▒▒░░▓██▒░░░▒▒▒▒░▒░░▒░             ░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓░▒█░                      
       ░▓▓▓▒▒░ ░    ▒▒▓▓▒░▒▒▒▒░         ░ ░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▓▒▒▓▓▒▒▒█▒                      
        ▒▒▒▓███▓▓▒░░░░▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒▒░          ░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒▒█▒                      
        ▓▒░░▒▒▒▓████▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▓▒         ░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▒▒▓█▒                      
        ██▓▒░░ ░▒▒▒░░░░▒▒   ▒▒░▒░        ░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▒▒▓▓█▒                      
        ▒██▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░     ░▒▒░░    ░░░░░▒░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒▒▒▒▓▓█▒                      
         ▓█▓▓███▓██▓▒▒░░░░▒░░▒▓█▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▓▒▒▓█▓                      
          ▓█▒░▒▓▓▓▓▓▒░░ ░▒▓▓▓▒▓█▓▒▒░▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▓▓▒▒▓▓██▒                      
          ░█▓▒▒░░░░░░░   ░▓▒▒▓▒▓▓▓▒░░░░░ ░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒▒▒▒▓▓▓██▒                      
           ▒█▓▒░▒▒▒▒░░░░░░▓▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▒░░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓██▒                      
           ░██▓▒▒▓▓▒░░▒▒▓░▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▓▓▓▓                       
            ▒██▓▓▒▓▒░▒▒▓█▓▒▓▓█████▒░░▒░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▓▒▒▓▓░                        
              ▓██████▓▓▓█████████▓▒░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▒▒▒░                        
                ▒████████████▓▓▒░ ░░▒▒▒▒░▒▒▒▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░▒▒▒░▒▓▒▒░                         
                  ▒▒▓██▓▓▒▒░░  ░░░░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░▒░░░░▒▒▒▓▒░                         
                     ░▒▓▓▓▓▒░▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░▒░▒▒░                          
                         ▒▓████▓▓▓▓▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░▒▒░                           
                    ░░      ▒▓███▓▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░  ░░░░░▒░                            
                     ▒░        ░▒▓▓▒▓▒░▒▒░░░   ░  ░  ░░░░▒░                             
                      ░░░         ░░░░ ░            ░░░░▒░                              
                                                    ░░░                                 
                                           ░ ░░   ░░

The 3rd version of the ASCII uses the Character Set: #WMBRXVYIti+=;:,.
I continued to use the higher brightness to make the look of the ASCII more clean and sharp.

I also inverted the colors to have white characters on black background, which is closer to the look and feel of MS DOS. MS DOS used a gray font on black background, but I did not try to make it authentic. I was more going after the looks of it.

                               +###################WI                                  
                          ;B#############################B                              
                       #####################################R                           
                    ############################################                        
                 X################################################V                     
               t####################################################I                   
              Y###################W######################M############V                 
             ####################################WW###########WW########:               
            ######################################################W#######              
          ############################W##################BWWMW#######M#####             
        #############################WW########W#########WW#################            
       ######W########################W#############################MW######            
       ######W#############################W################################M           
       ####Wt;X#####################W##################W##########W##########           
       ###W;  ,#####################W##WBM############WW##########B##########t          
       X##;    X###WW#############M#####################W###W################B          
        #I     ;W#MVR##WR######MRBRRMWW##WBRVVXBMWWW####WM############W######B          
        #       :X##M###XB####BBRRRRBBM#######WMWWMMMBBWM####WM#######MBM#####          
        # .:      ;VBRXR#M;tR#################W#######WW#WW#####W######W######          
        V ,:                    ;B########BX:  +B#MM##W#######################.         
        + ,:.                     .            iRRMBMMV#########W#############          
         .. .                                  :BVVWWWXB#####################M          
         ;                                     .B#BM##B##MW###WMW########WM##           
         ,                                      t#WXW###########W#########M##           
                                                =RMMWW#W###W############MW##=           
        ++.                                      Y#MYRBW#BRRM###########WW##+           
      +##V                                        W#RRXBW###WWMW############            
     =####WIVt,                                    =BW#RR####WW######MW####X            
  #    ,#######+ :  .                               ;B#####BM#####Y     +M#+            
        YM##+RBMWV. ,R######WVXBYI::;,,           ..=M#######Mi          :R             
         iWX:.+W##X;,:,;I#########WRYYRR+ .,  ,itYXVB#####M##,            i             
        ;.;=YRM#W,  =R     +####BYXRMBX###WV+=,      Y####R#M         :   V             
        =;;=i;:Bi    t##=  =VRXi.  IM: ==             VBBWBMY. i;     :. ,#             
       :++:=;  .       .,  :IIi:.   .                 t#####+,iI      :  WX             
      ;:   . :;                    .               ..  ItiRR;           X#              
      .      ,.                ::                  ..   .:+t:          =#               
      =     .+:                                    ,:  :;iII= ., .     #                
      ;     ;.     :;=;                           .   ::=iYVi.    :   #                 
      =               :,                              .,+iIXi.      +#                  
      ;    :.          +:                        ,..:. ,;+YB        #                   
      =i==Y##V+=+=YRi+t;                         ,;:.::=:tYX     .X#,                   
       IIR####WYM#W#Wt.                        ,.:: .=+=iIVIRY:;Y##                     
       VVtXXXMVVMXVRti+                       .::=;:=;i+iIVYMRiIMV                      
       iV=ti;:X#Mi:,;ii;;:;.,,                ,::, .;=++iIXVRY;iM                       
        XXVt+.      =+IRI:ii:;,            ..,,,.,:,;i=IVtIXXt=t#;                      
        +itRMWWRYi:,.,+IIYYI+++.           . .:,:;;=+i+IIIYXVItI#i                      
        Yt,:i=tV####V==iIttRV=iV;          .,::::=i+iIItIVVYYIIV#+                      
        R#Yi:.  it;. ..;+   ;=;;.         :,.,::;=+iIIt+tVVYtIVR#=                      
        i##YVX++i====t+:     .t+,         ,=;:;,+tiItiI+IIIItiYR#i                      
         Y#RYM#WBWWXI+,.  ;:,=YBV.,,  .,,,.,,,=+i+iIt+ttIYYtYIIR#V                      
          R#+;IXXRRY+,   iIYI+V#R+=,;;:;:.. ;:,i+=+t+iXYIVViIVXW#i                      
          ,WVt=:;. .,    ,IiIYIRXX;::;;  . ,::;==itittIYItiiVXRW#;                      
           t#Bi:+i++:.::::YIiIttVXi;,., .,.::+++++itttittitIVVVM#;                      
           .##Vi=IXt:.+tY;+Iti+tRI=...:;;:::=++++iIItiii+=tIYVYIX                       
            =##BYIXt;+iXMItYVMMM#M+.:=:=++i=+t+iiIIiti+==iYtIYY:                        
              YW####MBVBW########B=.;;;;=tti+iii+i+=+==;;=titIt                         
                ;############RY=   ;=+i=;ttiYI=+++==;,;+=.+Ii=.                         
                  ;+X##RY+;.    , ;=+i;+i++ti+====,;; .::=+IV+                          
                      ;VRXY+;+ti+itttiiti=+t+;++:;:.,::,.=:=I;                          
                         =XW##MYYRVYt++=++=;=i+:.::  ,.,.,;+;                           
                    .       ;RMW#RIit+=++++=:::,.     .:::+:                            
                     =         ,+YYIY+;==:..           ::;,                             
                                   .,                ,:;;                               
                                                    .,,

Last but not least the "Geek Version" using only 0 and 1. Well, Matt Cutts is an engineer and geek and probably loving this version the most hehe.

                               1000000000000000000001                                  
                          10000000000000000000000000000000                              
                       00000000000000000000000000000000000000                           
                    00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000                        
                 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001                     
               100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001                   
              100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001                 
             000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001               
            00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000              
          00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000             
        00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000            
       000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000            
       0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000           
       0000011100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000           
       00001   000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001          
       1001    100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000          
        01     100010000000000000000000000001110000000000000000000000000000000          
        0       11000000100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000          
        0         110010001100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000          
        1                       100000000001   1000000000000000000000000000000          
        1                                      1000000100000000000000000000000          
                                                011000100000000000000000000000          
         1                                      00000000000000000000000000000           
                                                10010000000000000000000000000           
                                                10000000000000000000000000001           
        11                                       1001000000000000000000000001           
      1001                                        00001000000000000000000000            
     100000111                                     1000000000000000000000001            
  0     00000001 1                                  100000000000001     1001            
        1000100001   0000000010011111               10000000001          10             
         101  100001 1 110000000000011001      11101000000000             1             
        1 1110000   10     1000001100000000111       10000000         1   1             
        111111 01    1001  11011   101 11             1000001  11     1   0             
       111 11               1111                      1000001 11      1  01             
      11      1                                        111001           00              
                                                          111          10               
      1      1                                         111111          0                
      1     1      1111                                111111     1   0                 
      1                                                 11111       10                  
      1                1                                1110        0                   
      111110011111101111                          1    1 111      10                    
       110000001000001                               11111110111100                     
       1111110110110111                          11111111111001101                      
       111111 1001  11111 1                         1111110101110                       
        11111       1110111111                      11111111111101                      
        1110000011    111111111                  11111111111111101                      
        11 1111100001111111011111                11111111111111101                      
        0011    111    11   1111                111111111111111001                      
        100111111111111       11           11 1 111111111111111001                      
         1001000000111    11 1101             11111111111111111001                      
          00111111011    1111110011 1111    11 1111111111111111001                      
           0111 1         1111101111 11     1111111111111111110001                      
           1001 1111   11 1111111111         111111111111111111001                      
            00111111  1111111111011    111  111111111111111111111                       
            10001111111001111000001  1 1111111111111111111111111                        
              100000001000000000001 111111111111111111111111111                         
                1000000000000011   111111111111111111 111 1111                          
                  111000111       1111111111111111 11    11111                          
                      1101111111111111111111111111       1 111                          
                         1100001101111111111111           111                           
                            1000001111111111  1           1                             
                     1          111111111                1                              
                                                       11                               

Pretty cool, eh? Go check out Photo2Text.com yourself and have fun with it.

It's fun. I actually had that much fun, that I am thinking of creating a little gallery with people in the search engine marketing space in ASCII format. Maybe even people from the affiliate marketing industry. This would maybe bring some people closer to the subject of text art and make them realize that you can do amazing things with something as simple as plain text.

Too bad that the converter does not support ANSI, to create colored version of an image. Maybe they develop a version in the future that supports that.

The history of text art dates back hundreds, if not even thousands of years and were not an invention that came with the computer as many people tend to believe. The first "modern" text art was created on typewriters, which are around for well over 100 years.

I also blogged in the past about things like ASCII animations, called ASCIImation. The music video example that was made up entirely of text was cool too.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Beck ASCIImation and a Walking Man 7-Bit ASCII

I came across two cool examples of ascii art made entirely out of 7-bit US-ASCII characters only, using only letters, number etc.

As a refresher, here is the complete US-ASCII character set.

US Charsset - ascii 32 (space) to 126 (tilde ~)
 
    ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
  @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O         
  P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
  ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
  p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~  
 

The first one is a picture of a walking man.

The ASCII is pretty small (see full size picture below), but if you size it down to a degree where you can't see the actual letter anymore (see image to the right), you will notice how detailed the picture actually is. A true piece of art.




<------ ROCKS!
<--------- YEAH!
<------------- BABY!

<----- 100% PURE US-ASCII




The second cool piece of ASCII art I came across is a music video by Beck for one of his songs called "Black Tambourine".

I am not a big Beck fan and did not know about the existance of the video until recently. The whole video is in ASCII. A true ASCIImation. Awesome! Check it out!



Backup Link to Video at YouTube.

That's it. I just wanted to let you know about my discoveries.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCII plus Animation is ASCIImation

A fellow ASCII artist with the pseudonym "Skylined" over at deviantART sent me something cool and unique and makes me rethink about "the death" of text art in the internet age. It's pretty much kicking butt for something that was announced dead by Microsoft over a decade ago.

He does not have a real website (the URL I got works sometimes and sometimes it does not) and what he did can not be displayed at deviantART, so I asked him for permission to put it on my website and he was okay with it.

What he did is a combination of Text art and cool JavaScript coding to get the desired effects.

The first one is a horizontal scrolling "Star Field Effect" emulation, which used to be very popular during the end of the eighties and nineties with demosceners and crack intro coders alike.

It also "fades in" and out an ASCII logo, which can be easily replaced by different logos, because it is pulled dynamically from an external text file on the fly. No coding necessary.

You can see the real-time "Star Field" animation here or click on the image.

The second piece is even cooler in my opinion, but the graphic is not as easy to replace. It is possible though, but you need to know a bit about JavaScript that you done screw it up.

The Animation contains two main parts. The first one is a "Morph" effect between four different ASCII logos, which are also cool and done by Skylined himself.

I like the "Shark-like" logo the best, because it looks even more 3D with the morph effect than it did already without it.

But his ASCII called "Julia at Awakenings", which was a contribution to the Non-Existent ASCII contest at deviantART in November/December last year is also pretty cool.

He did not win unfortunately, although he was my personal favorite and got my #1 vote (I was one of the judges of the contest).

The second part is actually more impressive and something for the coders at heart, what I am unfortunately not. It shows a real-time Mandelbrot fractal look-alike zoom and rotation and was programmed entirely (no ASCII logo).

Check the Morph and Mandelbrot Animation here or click on one of the images.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Keyboard Text Art From Over Twenty Years Before ASCII

The Modern Merchanix Blog published in March, April and July 2006 three remarkable examples of nineteen thritees and fourties typewriter art, also known as keyboard art.

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The artwork was found in various preserved issues of the magazine "Popular Science" from 1939 and 1948. The Popular Science Magazine is still publishing today. They also have a website with a lot of (current ;)) content online. Visit the Popular Science Magazine Website.

The art was created by the artists on classic mechanical typewriter machines. "Personal" Computers did not exist at that time yet, the term computer was not coined yet either and the ASCII standard was still 20-30 years away in the future.

The following example is from 1939. One year earlier in 1938 did Germany’s Konrad Zuse finish the Z1, one of the first binary digital computers and a machine that could be controlled through a punch tape. The project started in 1936 and the Z1 is considered by many the "first computer" and Konrad Zuse the "Inventor of the modern Computer".

Source: Popular Science Magazine,
Issue: 6-1939

Typewriter Artist Produces Pictures Like Tapestry
by Rosaire J. Belanger


Pictures that resemble tapestry are produced with a typewriter by Rosaire J. Belanger, a mill worker in Saco, Me. Belanger first draws a pencil sketch on a sheet of paper, then inserts it in his typewriter and fills in the sketch with various characters to produce shading and outlines. With carbon paper, he transfers the picture onto graph paper, and copies it on blank paper.

Picture Description
George Washington, as pictured with a type-writer by Rosaire J. Belanger. At the left, the artist at the keyboard.




The following two examples are from 1948.
1948 is the same year when IBM built the SSEC (Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator). The IBM computer behemoth contained 12,000 tubes.


Source: Popular Science Magazine,
Issue: 7-1948

Typewritten Flag
by Menno Fast


Anyone can draw an accurate picture of the American flag on a typewriter, according to Menno Fast, a relief worker in Poland.

Fast read a recent Popular Mechanics article on drawing pictures with a typewriter.

He submits a drawing of the flag as proof that it can be made on an ordinary typewriter using standard spacing.

The flag, with a full 13 stripes and 48 stars, appears to be rippling in the wind.





Source: Popular Science Magazine,
Issue: 10-1948

KEYBOARD ART
By Paul Hadley


WHILE purely entertaining, doodling with a typewriter gives vent to the imagination and originality of both the experienced and the hunt-and-peck typist.

Fill-in pictures are the easiest to “draw” with a typewriter. An example is shown in the flower which is made with the letter X alone.

Such pictures, whether a flower or a portrait, are made by using an outline of the subject as a typing guide.

This is done by tracing the outline lightly on paper and backing it with carbon paper to type the picture.

Caricature or cartoon “drawing” combines letters with symbols as shown in the examples below.

Here, half-spacing of the typewriter is required, as in the case of the owl’s beak and feet.

The log cabin shows what can be done in drawing a picture in perspective.

Resources to Computer History

• The History of Computers - A Computer History Timeline at About.com.


• COMPUTER HISTORY - History from B.C. to today by Computer Hope.

Resources to Text Art History

• The History of ASCII (Text) Art by Joan G. Stark


• ASCII art at Wikipedia Encyclopedia


• 100 YEARS OF THE COMPUTER ART SCENE - Transcript (text), presented by Jason Scott and RaD Man (ACiD), Notacon Conference - Cleveland, Ohio, USA, April 23-25th, 2004

I hope you enjoyed the little trip back in time.

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Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

History of Text Art Video by RaD Man / ACiD

I "messed around" with the Wikipedia article to ASCII art today. Okay, I did not mess with it, but rather cleaned it up and extended it a bit.

This was triggered by a video of a friend of mine who is a well known figure in the underground text art scene with the name Christian Wirth.

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Okay, he is not known by that name, but by his scene "Handle" which is RaD Man. RaD Man was a senior member of the art group Aces of ANSI art in 1989, which is the first known underground text art group on the PC and founded a year after, in 1990, the probably best known and respected ANSI art group with the name ACiD. ACiD stands for ANSI Creators in Demand.

RaD Man was in Finland a couple years ago at the Assembly Demo party and was doing a presentation about the History of Text art.

The presentation is about 1 hour long and covers the early forms of text art starting at the ancient Rome, to Typewriter art, Radio Teletype or RTTY, Atari ATASCII art and C-64 PETSCII art to Amiga 500+ Oldskool art and PC Block or High ASCII art and Newskool. The climax is the presentation of some impressive Textmode demos that are of relative young age (2002 and later).

You can get the video, gigabytes of Text art and related material such as Tools and Editors, DiscMags and Source Code on DVD.

RaD Man published his extensive collection.

The DVD is called "Dark Domain" and you can order it directly from here.

It is only $12.99 plus $4.55 (US) - $9.55 (International) shipping. Quite a bargin considering the amount of content on it.

Here is the full video for free. I still recommend getting the DVD, because the Video is only a very small part of the DVD (which are actually 2 DVDs). To get your head around how much content it is, visit the Art Scene Text Files Archive and look for yourself how much stuff is out there.

There were some glitches during the presentation, but RaD Man is not a professional presenter. So, be a bit forgiving. Great stuff though and worth showing to other folks that are interested in this kind of stuff.

Enjoy the Video! (Backup URL to Video)

Presentation full credits and details.

The ASSEMBLY 2004 demoparty was held at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, Finland from 5th to 8th of August 2004. The presentation was part of the ASSEMBLY '04 ARTtech seminars.

Presenter: Christian Wirth
Presentation Title: "The Art of Textmode"
Organization: ACID
Position: Founder and President
Homepage: http://www.acid.org
Dark Domain DVD: http://www.darkdomain.org (released 2004)
Email: radman@acid.org
Scene alias: Rad Man




Christian Wirth during an interview by Jason Scott (textfiles.com) for the BBS Documentary film DVD











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Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Contest Ruling Is Finally In - Special Bonus Prizes Revealed

The ruling for the ANSI/ASCII Text Art contest at deviantART is finally in. I blogged about the end of it and my personal favorite about a week ago. Unfortunately did the other judges not agree with me.

What surprised me a bit was that skylined's entry did not even make the top 5, but it shows how different the opinions of the 6 judges were. Being voted #1 by one judge does not make it a sure win.

Somebody that was voted #3 or #4 by all judges has a much higher chance of winning.

Here is how the judging works. Every Judge has 15 points to assign, 5 points to the #1, 4 points to the #2, 3 to #3, 2 to #5 and finally 1 point to the #1. This makes 90 points altogether for all 6 judges combined. 5 points does not look like that much anymore, right?

Anyway, all entries can be reviewed here if you want to check them out. The 5 Winners are the following:

Next to the official prizes will every one of the five winners get a one of my "deviantART ASCII" Mouse pads (since all winners were ASCIIs), a small Magnet of my "deviantART ANSI" print and a post card of my ANSI print as well. I hope the winners will like the little extra bonus prizes. Merry Christmas.

Cheers,

Carsten

The ASCII/ANSI Contest Is Over

Last week did the ASCII and ANSI contest at deviantART end. You can see all contributions to the contest here. I already made my judgements, but a few are still outstanding. That means that no results are available yet.

Yet I still want to present my personal favorite. The artists name is Berend-Jan Wever aka skylined.

His contribution is the 7bit ASCII called "Julia at Awakenings". Here is a small version of the image. It is not original size. Click on the image to get to the deviation which is in original size that you can clearly see that it is made out of regular characters which you can find on your keyboard.



I like the style. I like the ASCII logo of his name actually even better. Especially this one. .






Yep, it's a shark. I think that the Idea alone is already astonishing, let alone the realization by using simple text characters.


The following two logos look like "Disco" style.. without the bright colors hehe. I don't like them as much, but they are somewhat cool anyway.

This one seems to be the predecessor of the contest entry. The Idea is already visible, but the realization is much simpler than for "Julia at Awakenings".




Well, I am looking forward to hear the ruling. More to that later this week.

The Non-Existent ASCII/ANSI contest extended!

The deadline for the deviantART ASCII/ANSI art contest, which I blogged about earlier this month, was extended for a few more days. This will be the last chance to enter and win some great prices for everybody with some Text art skills who has not entered the contest yet.

Also some other things changed a little. Here are the words from DiamonDie who is the initiator and organizer of the contest.

Sorry for the bit of a late notice, but the deadline of the Non-Existent ASCII/ANSI contest has been pushed back by two weeks, making 9th of December the new deadline.

Due to the very small amount of ANSI entries we'll probably have to merge the two contest categories, but in that case we'll be offering prizes (subscriptions and DVDs) to five winners. That means you stand a good chance of winning something!

So those of you who have said you'll participate but haven't and those who have had their entries disqualified and have agreed to fix them, you've got two more weeks left. Even if you had missed the original contest announcement you still have time to draw an entry. So start typing already!

There will also be a surprise which will be announced AFTER the contest (or it would not be a surprise, wouldn't it? :) )

So you better get the Text Editors on the coming days and get something delivered before the new deadline.

You can check the contests rules here, if you haven't already done so earlier.

ANSI and ASCII Text Art as Print!

Mhhh... It seems that I post at my ASCII and ANSI Text Art blog always in pairs now. I should better plan those things I guess, but the heck, who cares.

Okay, here is post number two for today.

I took the new deviantART Prints Service for a spin, which was launched parallel with the
new deviantART shop. I made two of my deviations available for purchase for your and my own pleasure.

Fans of ANSI and ASCII Text will probably love it. I already ordered one of each for myself.

For all the Fans of dA and ANSI Text Art is the left piece available (click the image for the LARGE Version, 1390x1165) and for all Fans of the ASCII Text Art the right one.

Buy ANSI Print	Buy ASCII Print

Following formats and item types are available for each of the two with the price right next to it (I ordered for myself the Mousepads):

Canvas Canvas Prints 28x36 cm $78.95 Regular Prints Lustre Prints 25x30 cm $15.49 Matte Prints 25x30 cm $12.79 Glossy Prints 25x30 cm $12.79 Magnets Small Magnet $4.95 Large Magnet $6.95

Postcards Matte Postcard $2.49 Glossy Postcard $2.49 Other Mouse Pad Mouse Pad $9.95 Coaster Set of 4 Coasters $20.25

Enjoy!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Chemical Reaction (cRO)

It took me 5 months, but I finally managed to create the Wikipedia entry for the fellow Artscene group cHEMICAL rEACTION or simply cRO.

I talked with Dennis aka Radiators, the founder and ex-leader of the group and Amgits at the #cRO channel at EFNet about this in June. Dennis sent me some graphics and Amgits found an old cRO history in the Google cache. The current cRO Website does unfortunately not have a history page to draw information from.

I am glad that I finally managed to get this done and of my very long list of things to do and I am sure that it will be appreciated by the ex- and current cRO members as well as other old-school sceners who remember the creations of this fine art group.



The cRO entry is a good addition to the already existing artscene groups entries at Wikipedia. They are now recognized along with other famous art groups like ACiD (ANSI creators in demand) and of course SAC (Superior art creations).

If you see any errors or missing information in the article, don't hesitate and simply change the wikipedia entry yourself. If you do not feel comfortable doing so, shoot me an email and I will do it for you.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCII and ANSI Art Contest at deviantART

It's a bit late for it, but better late than never. There is also still plenty of time for people that are interested to participate.

You Text Artists out there, get your editors started up and start creating some nice Text Art. This is also a good chance for newbies to get your art seen by others and useful feedback.

DiamonDie over at deviantART.com launched an ASCII / ANSI Contest with the topic "Non-Existent"

The Deadline for the contest is 25th of November 2006. The entries can be edited until the deadline. You can read the details and Contest Rules in DiamondDie's News Article at deviantART.

Is it worth your time to participate in this contest? You bet it is! Not only fame and fortune can be gained, but great prizes too.

Okay no fortune , but a lot of fame and did I mention the prizes? How do these prizes look like? Pretty, don't they?

Prizes
1st prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a copy of the Dark Domain DVD from ACiD Productions and a one-year subscription to DeviantART

2nd prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a six-month subscription to DeviantART

3rd prize in both categories ASCII and ANSI:
a three-month subscription to DeviantART



I will be one of the judges hence not take part in the contest myself. I am looking forward to see your contributions.

You can read all the details about the contest, including the detailed rules, background information about ANSI/ASCII Art contests in general, ASCII and ANSI tools used, Tutorials and more in her Article about the Contest Announcement.

Hop over to deviantART.com to check it out. If you don't have an Account yet, then it is about time to get one; it's free so there is no reason not to.

Good Luck and no, I can not be bribed :)
Cheers,

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Tools of the Trade

I get often asked what tools I am using for my did my ASCII and ANSI Text art.

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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 no limitations.

At the Moment seems the Windows Editor PabloDraw to be very popular. It allows multi user collaborations in real-time over the Internet. Multiple user can edit the same file at the same time. Crazy!

If PabloDraw is too crazy for you and the DOS Editors not manageable for you (It's tough if you are not familiar with MS DOS at all), you might want to have a look at TundraDraw for Windows. That might be the perfect alternative for you.

You should try them out, it's Fun!

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Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Official Re-Launch of RoySAC.com

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 art
I appreciate that

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCIIs that are NOT ASCIIs - or are they?

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 for over 2 decades. Yes, labeled incorrectly.

No scientific debate will change the past and I won't start changing it either . The mislabeling was never corrected when there was the chance and when it became known, was it already too late. The incorrect terminology got already stuck in the mind of the users and could not be corrected anymore. Live with it!

Example. Here is a Logo that is indisputably an ASCII by all standards and definitions. This is the same Logo, the "Energy" NFO ASCII using "Block ASCII" or ""High ASCII" Style and now look at the "ANSI" Version of the "ASCII" using Escape Sequences for Color Coding.

I guess you have to live with this incorrectness as much as I did for over 15 years. If you want to learn more about the Styles used on the PC by the "Underground", have a look at my article "The three Styles of the Underground Text Art Scene".

Important decision made regarding my Text Art

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, it is being copyrighted automatically by current laws. Your rights are protected by simply doing nothing.

Grabbing and replication or showing your art under those circumstances without getting explicit permission from you to do so would be a violation of your copyright and you could hold me liable for any "damage" or "loss" this might have caused you. There are some exceptions, such as "fair use", but I don't want to make this post a Copyright Laws 101 resource. If you do want to learn more about Copyright, check the article about it at Wikipedia.

I wanted to avoid this confusion and make my intention clear. I put all my Text Art online some weeks ago. You can look at every single piece I created with your browser at my Roy/SAC Artist Website. Every Artwork I did release into the public domain shows that clearly and without conditions in the full size detail page. See the Skylight BBS ANSI as an example.

List of Roy/SAC Art Galleries Roy ASCII Text Art Gallery Roy ANSI Text Art Gallery Roy Best Of Text Art Gallery Roy Latest Text Art Roy VGA Art Gallery

If the if does not show this for any piece of art on my side, then it means, that I did not release the copyright. This is the case for my Web Art, where I used other copyright protected content in fair use, and can not give up the copyright because I never owned it in the first place. I got aware about the whole issue and the actual status of my art during my editor work at Wikipedia.

Go ahead and check out the about one-thousand pieces of my artistic creations which I did release into the public domain. Good candidates for possible re-use are my vga fonts Gold Font and Font 3. Use them as you see fit. If you do, mentioning my name or artist handle in the credits would be appreciated but is not a requirement. I also put up a link to a special Amazon Honor System Page. Feel free to donate any amount you feel being appropriate. Donations are voluntarily. You don't have to donate anything to use my art. They are only one of many possible ways of showing respect and appreciation. Thank you.


If you think about giving up your copyright for something to release it into public domain, be warned. Released is released. You can not "regain" protection for something that was officially released into public domain.

---

Soccer World Cup 2006 in Germany - News Update:
Germany lost against Italy at the Semi Finals.
France emerged victorious from the match against Portugal. This means:
... Italy will meat France this Saturday 07/09/2006 in Berlin/Germany to the Soccer World Cup 2006 Final. I hope that Italy is going to kick some french butt since Germany can not do it for them anymore.

ANSI/ASCII Text Art Galleries back up again

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 of fun.

I wanted to write the follow up post to my post from last Friday about Commission Junctions Link Initiative on Tuesday Night already, but I had absolutely no time to do it. They had a public podcast on Tuesday where they "addressed" the issues or at least some of them and new information became available that shed some light into this. I might get it together later tonight or on the weekend.

Cheers,

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Ansi gallery temporarily unavailable

The ANSiLove Script used on my Site to display my Text Art galleries ceased working properly yesterday. I have not figured out yet why this is happening.

You will see broken images instead of the Art work at the moment. I hope to find the problem soon and get the gallery working again.

Its a small disappointment after my excitement a few days earlier. I apologize for the inconvenience. I hope you will come back later again to check out my gallery once its up and running.

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Update 6/1/2006: Problem not found yet. I am still working on it. Please bear with me on this one.

My Art Galleries Launched - Over 700 pieces of Text Art

I came across a nice php script called AnsiLove last week. The Script converts original ANSI and ASCII files to an Image in real-time. The characters are rendered correctly and the DOS Ansi colors are correct as well. The Font used is true to the original MS DOS font. I was delighted.

The Script is also easy to use and I was able to add it to my Website in no time at all.

I spent in the past a lot of time making screen shots of my ANSI's and ASCII's with a Screen Capture Tool and the ANSI/ASCII Viewer ACiDView for Windows (which can be found at my download page). All my sample art on my Roy/SAC Text Artist Homepage and my "deviations" at my deviantARTArtist Page were done this way.

I have to continue using this method for my deviantART pieces for two reasons though. First because I have to upload my Art to their Servers and second am I also adding some comments with background information for each piece of Art. I believe this to be a good thing to do, because it gives the viewer a bit more insight about the times and events surrounding the creation of the Art Work.

Okay, I can't use it for my deviantART stuff, but I was able to put all my 700+ pieces of ASCII and ANSI Art on to my Website with a very small amount of effort. This is great!

When I was working on the Scripts to display my Text Art did I realize, that I can do the same for my VGA Art as well, without AnsiLove.

I finalized the new Pages today and would like you to check them out. I created several Galleries, an ASCII Gallery with all my ASCII Art, an ANSI Gallery with all my ANSI Art, a "Best Of" Gallery with all my favorite Text Art pieces (ANSI and ASCII mixed), a "Latest Text Art" Gallery where I simply copy my recent creations to, a VGA Art Gallery with my SAC VGA Work and finally my Web Graphic Gallery which shows some stuff I did for my Websites.

Here is an Example of how AnsiLove renders an ASCII. The Image is based on an ASCII File and is rendered in real-time. Great, isn't it?

Roy/SAC Blog Redesigned - Tribute to Text Art

Anybody who is an active blogger could recognize the default blogger template layout which I used for my Roy/SAC Blog when I launched it at the beginning of February.

I did some changes to it to have it at least look a bit different, but that was not enough, the basic design of the blogger template was still clearly visible.

I used this weekend to take care of that issue for good and redesigned the Blog. The Blog continues to use black as the general background. The MS DOS background was black and ASCII's look best with white font on dark background which made me pick the template with the black background in the first place.

I did not want to change anything about that concept, because I liked at back then and I still like it today.

In incorporated some "fake" and "real" Block ANSI elements into the design. I will probably continue doing some fine tuning over the next months for those elements, especially the text borders.

Over all does my Blog now look much better and you can tell, that it is primarily about me, Roy/SAC and what I did and do using that nick name, ASCII and ANSI Text Art and some Pixel VGA Art.

Please come and have a look for yourself and tell me what you think about it. If you have any ideas, generic or specific or even criticism, do not hesitate and just add a comment to this post. You can do so anonymously, if you do not want to tell me your name.

Cheers,
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Here is a sample, that you get an idea. Click on the Image to open a full size screen shot.

31 Pieces of Art added to my deviantART Page

I spent several hours today on my home page at deviantART. I added 31 ASCII's, ANSI's and VGA's from my personal "best of" collection.

It wasn't the upload of the art that took so much of my time. What took the time was writing comments for every single uploaded piece of my art. Some Comments were quite detailed and have some inside details about the Group, BBS, FTP Server (etc.) the Art Work was created for.Also some interesting stories about the actual circumstances that lead to the creation of the individual piece. It's often not only interesting to read for the people that were also part of the scene at those times and can personally relate to the things I am talking about. It is also interesting for the viewer who never had anything to do with the whole thing and is just interested in the classic art of ASCII and ANSI Text Art and Low-Res VGA (320x200 256 Colors or 640x480 16 Colors).

Whatever the case, I believe it will be worthwhile for you to stop by and have a look for yourself. Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

ASCII Lens Rebuilt

After the Schlock and desperation on Thursday night when I found out that my Squidoo.com Lens about ASCII and ANSI Text Art was severely damaged and a lot of it's content gone all whining did not help so I went off and was looking for something to do that would distract me and get my mind off the problem with Squidoo. I actually found a pretty nice distraction in form of a Website called DeviantArt.com which is dedicated to Artists and Art loving people who can use Deviant Art to publish their Art and interact in a virtual community via Forums, Comments and Personal Groups. Every Member has its own Homepage. The free Membership offers everything you need as Hobbyist. Memberships are interesting for the folks that want to sell their Art to interested Buyers. My Home Page at Deviant Art is here. You can Showcase your latest Art and favorites. You have a Personal Journal you can write and make public to visitors. Other Member can visit your Page and leave comments just to you, but also to your Journal entries and published pieces of Art. They offer much more and I can only recommend that you check it out.

I spent today several hours to rebuilt my ASCI & ANSI Text Art Lens at Squidoo. It is now all good and shiny again.Have a look here. My Lens-Rank improved too. I am now # 31 in the Art Category and # 263 across all Categories. I hope that this will not happen anytime soon again. I was lucky that I had most of the content somewhere else saved which made it not as hard as I initially thought to rebuilt it. See you at Deviant Art. Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC.

Sample ANSI and ASCII Screen Shots

Here are two sample screenshots of my work to give you an idea what you are dealing with here. One is an ASCII (in "Block" or "High" ASCII Style) and the other a classic BBS ANSI. Between the 2 passed almost 8 years, most of it dedicated to SAC. I produced all in all over 700 pieces of ASCII, ANSI and VGA Art between 1992 and now.

Deviance NFO File Ascii Logo (2002)
I created this ASCII in 2002 after I retired from SAC. I used to play HOMM3 (Heroes of Might and Magic 3) a lot and Deviance released HOMM4, the sequel which I appreciated very much and decided to do an Ascii for them, because I did not like the one they used for the HOMM4 release. Since I did not have any active contacts with the "scene" delivery of the Ascii became somewhat of a problem. I am not sure until this day, if they ever got it or not.
My pre-ordered copy of HOMM4 arrived a few days later via mail which I sadly never played as much as the previous Version. HOMM5 is coming out soon and I might get to play that one a bit.





Skylight BBS Ansi Logo (1994)
I created this ANSI for my friend and fellow Sysop Gee who operated the BBS called Skylight in Berlin/Germany. I did not founded SAC yet (happened a few months later), which is the reason why the ANSI is not signed Roy/SAC, but Roy/TRSI-Faith of which I was a member of at the time. Although it's one of my older ANSI's, it's still one of my all time favorites.

I did spend a lot time on it and also revised it multiple times. It was also a bit of an experiment for me, because it was not a "classic Roy Style" ANSI. The burning dot of the lower-case "i" became a motive I would re-use in various other ASCII's and ANSI's, but it was this ANSI where I used it first.

You might wonder why the 2 examples posted first in this blog are each from a time outside of SAC. I have to tell you, that I realized that after I posted it. The Text to the samples did I add at a later time, when I realized who this post with just the images was looking like in the RSS Feed of the Blog. Well, It got me thinking. I will let you know, if I find the answer .... :)

1st Blog entry. An Introduction is in order

"Who the heck is Roy? What does SAC stand for? and last but not least, What has ASCII to do with Art?" ... Well, you are still here so I guess you will find out :)

SAC was part of the Underground Computer Art Scene during the time of DOS and BBS's.
SAC is short for Superior Art Creations and yes, I came up with this ingenious Name in 1994.

It's about TEXT Art, also known as ASCII and ANSI Art, a very rare form of ART which had it's prime in the early 90's before the realm of the Internet. People that knew how to operate computers well and even loved it were still considered "Geeks" and the stuff on the mind of those geeks were things like Hacking, Phreaking, Anarchy and Warez ;) (then Girls).

I officially retired from the Founder/Leader position in 1999 and as Member on 7/6/2001.
The offical SAC Website moved from http://www.superiorart.org/ to www.SuperiorArtCreations.com (still under construction though).

My official Homepage is located at http://www.RoySAC.com/default.asp.

All SAC Art Packs can be downloaded there, also all PPE's (PCBoard Bulletin Board Scripts) developed by SAC and PNS, graphical tools and more.

Tons of related links and merchandising you can not find everywhere as easily and condensed in one place which is also highly related to computer art and design is showcased and last but not least an article about The 3 ASCII Art Styles of the Underground ...with screenshots to illustrate it.

Well, I guess plenty of reasons to stop by one time when you have a minute.

Cheers, Carsten Cumbrowski a.k.a. Roy/SAC