Scene Pixel Art Logos Collection Vol.1

I blogged about scene pixel art logos last December and about the Flickr.com collection where I posted many scene logos and more.

I collected a lot more logos since then and I did not update the Flickr.com collection yet. The main reason for that is the inability for me to avoid uploading the same logos again that I already uploaded to Flickr before. Flickr does not provide any option to de-dupe images within an account, collection nor set (bummer).

So I decided to pack everything up and make it somewhat of an official release. I saw Ben Garrett's logo pack for Defacto2.net and pretty much copied his format hehe. My collection includes the Defacto2.net collection entirely (as of May 2009), unless Ben added a significant amount of new logos to his collection since I last synchronized it with mine.

My Scene Pixel Art Logos Collection of over 6000 logos for over 1500 groups, bbs, demos and more from the Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga and PC demo and warez scenes.

The collection can be downloaded at my Mediafire.com account. The ZIP archive is about 162 MB in size.

The release was created like a standard scene release, the collection itself was compressed with WinRAR and the RAR file was then packed with WinZIP. The Zip file also contains the release NFO file, File_ID.diz and a small intro for Windows. You can watch the intro as video capture and the NFO + File_ID.diz below.

Download and Spread RoySAC-LogosPixelArtSceneVol1.zip!!!

I hope you will enjoy this pack.

 

The release Intro

Backup Link to video on Vimeo.com
Download this video in AVI format

Credits for this little intro:

Code: Peace/Testaware
Graphics and Design: Roy/SAC
Music: tune "cognition" by Jozz/TRSI

The Release NFO File

     ───────── ▄ ▄▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄  ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄▄▄ ▄ ─────────
     ·R·E·L·.·  ▄ ▄▄▄▄ ▀▀▀▀▀▀███ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀███ █ ███ ▀ ███ ▄▄▄▄ ▄  ·2·0·0·9·
     ─────────── ▄ ▄▄▄ ███ ▄▄██▀ █ ███ █ ███ █▄ ▀▀▀▀▀███ ▄▄▄ ▄ ───────────
                    ▄▄ ███ ▄ ███ █ ███▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄  ▄▄▄▄▄███ ▄▄
                       ▀▀▀   ███ ▀  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

                         Roy/SAC presents

                    Scene Pixel Art Logos Collection V1.0


              Packaged and Released on June 17, 2009


      ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
              Release Notes:


              Over 6200 Images for over 1500 Groups, BBS, Demos and more
              from the Commodore 64, Amiga and PC Demo– and Warez Scenes
      ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
              Installation:


              Simply UnRAR the file "Logos Pixel Art Scene.rar"
              It should automatically create 27 sub folders named
              Logos 0–9, Logos A .... Logos Z


              Below that are sub folders for each Group, Demo, BBS etc.
              where you can find the logos that I collected for each of them
              to this date. There are duplicates, where I am slowly but steady
              working on eliminating, but I rather have a logo twice or more 
              than not having a logo at all. :)
      ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
              Greeting:
              Defacto2.net, Scene.org, Textfiles.com, Pouet.net
              Demoscene.tv, GfxZone, Intro Inferno, C64.org, OSDM, 
              AMP, Edge, Sizteen Colors, Flashtro, Old–Skool.net,
              Untergrund.net, Bitfellas, Exotica and everybody else who 
              works on preserving the rich history of the scene and makes 
              it accessible for future generations to enjoy.


              Group Greetings:
              Blocktronix (thanks for keeping the ANSI scene alive and kickin)
              CPI (Oldskool forver!)
              RoORS (nice DVD Release)
              Andomeda Software Development (Your demos rock! Period!)


             Personal Greetings to:
              Madmax/CPI, Peace/Testaware, Smash/Fairlight, Shamen/Dytec,
              DaLezy, Dipswitch, Mandibular Joint Dysfunction, RaD Man/ACiD,
              Jason Scott/Textfiles.com, Ben Garrett/Defacto2, my blog readers, 
              Lord Scarlet/SixteenColors, Zerovision/Blocktronics and everybody
              else I know and forgot to mention :)

      ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
              Check out the intro in this release "LogosCollectionIntro.exe" :)


              and don't forget visiting http://www.RoySAC.com
              and to check out my blog at http://www.roysac.com/blog



   Additional URLs you might want to check out
              
   Over 300 demos, cracktros and other scene related videos
   http://www.youtube.com/sacreleases


   Scene Images of all sorts
   http://www.flickr.com/photos/cumbrowski/collections/72157611288618058/
   http://www.flickr.com/photos/cumbrowski/collections/72157612320706642/
           
   My Mediafire.com file share related to the scene, tons of files to download!
   http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=b570d9e07985879c7069484bded33bcd06b0971baa3373fa


   My ASCII Art Academy to learn more about classic Text Art
   http://www.roysac.com/learn/


   Links to other useful resources online to learn more about the scene
   http://www.roysac.com/roy_links.asp

              Signing off!
         
              Roy of Superior Art Creations, CPI, Dytec, Razor 1911, TRSI, TDU–Jam, PNS

The Release File_ID.diz

▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄  ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄
 ▀▀▀▀▀▀███ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀███ █ ███ ▀ ███ ▄
 ███ ▄▄██▀ █ ███ █ ███ █▄ ▀▀▀▀▀███ ▄
 ███ ▄ ███ █ ███▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄  ▄▄▄▄▄███
 ▀▀▀   ███ ▀  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀  ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
            Roy/SAC presents
 Scene Pixel Art Logos Collection
 ───────────────────────────────────
 Over 6200 Images for over 1500
 Groups, BBS, Demos and more
 from the Commodore 64, Amiga and PC
 Demo– and Warez Scenes
 ───────────────────────────────────
 Packaged on June 17, 2009
 and don't forget visiting RoySAC.com

Update! Scene Fonts Collection Vol 1.0

I also released "Scene Fonts Collection Vol 1.0"

A collection of over 600 font sets from demos, intros, cracktros, demo makers and other sources from the Atari ST, Amiga and PC. The collection is 37 MB in size and can be downloaded from my MediaFire.com account as well.

Download and Spread roysac-scenefontscollectionvol1.zip

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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

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

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

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

Scene Pixel Art Font Sets Collection

My last post was about legendary pixel art logos of the PC and Commodore Amiga scenes and the collection with over 25 sets of logo images that I created at my Flickr.com account to share them with everybody who is also interested in this stuff.

I did now also uploaded my collection of scene pixel art font sets to Flickr.com. I created a special collection for the font set images, which includes today 8 different sets with over 500 font sets overall. I have a bunch more, but in raw format or sliced up with individual images for each character and not the appropriate format to upload and share on a social media web site like Flickr.com.

Handmade, with No Filters to Polish

The fonts were pixeled by hand, just like the logos were. Many of them on the Commodore Amiga with image editing tools like Deluxe Paint and others on the IBM PC with MS DOS, using tools like the PC adaptation of Deluxe Paint (Deluxe Paint 2 enhanced or Deluxe Paint Animation), Autodesk Animator Pro or similar tools (you can find download links to the mentioned MS DOS editors at my download page).

No Adobe Photoshop or similar modern day editors were used by the artist. Everything had to be done manually. VGA art was painstaking work back in those days and required more fundamental skills of design and visual perception and lighting than you need today, where some stuff is done automatically by the tool (e.g. anti-aliasing) or you have a filter plug-in that does the desired effect for you. Those editors also had no "undo" or "history" features. "Undo" was more like a "re-do", at least for everything that you did since you created a backup copy of the image you are working on and not overwrote with newer versions since then.

Difference between Fonts Today and Oldskool Pixel Fonts

Unlike most fonts used today on the computer, which are commonly True Type fonts, which is a vector format allowing the fonts to be scalable and remain smooth regardless of the size you choose, pixel fonts are fixed size and cannot be scaled. They are basically an image. You can create pixel or bitmap fonts for the use on a Windows PC or Macintosh, if you have the right tools (here is a tutorial how to do that),  but that is not the type of font that you will find in my collection.

The Purpose of those Fonts

The fonts in my collection were never meant to be used as a font in an operating system by different applications, such as Word processors or image editing programs. Those fonts were usually designed for a specific purpose that was known to the artist before he even started to create one. That purpose was typically a "demo" or "Intro" project, or maybe a computer game development project.

The programmer had to "slice up" the image with the font characters in it and then use the individual slices that represent a character in his code to do something with it, such as creating a text scroller or apply some other fancy effects to have text messages appear into on the screen or to make them disappear. Those effects range from simple faders, over zoomers to elaborate effects where the letters are twisted and bent and rotated or combination of all or multiple of the mentioned ones.

Here is an example of a font, which also includes maker lines that were added by the artist to make it easier for the coder/programmer to "slice-up" the font and get the individual characters out of the image.

My Pixel Font Creations

Although I was known as an ANSI and ASCII text artist in the "scene" back in those days, I also did some pixel art work. I did not do very much, because I was never more than average doing it. I realized that it is better to stick to what you are best at and leave the pixel stuff to the guys that are really good doing it, such as the former SAC member and personal friend "Dream Design", who was capable of creating astonishing pieces of art within the limitations of colors available to use and screen resolution.

I created 13 pixel art fonts, mostly for some cracktros SAC created for some other release groups. I created a separate set for those fonts at Flickr.com. I did not do that to highlight them and to show how great I am (or was), I separated them, because the legal situation for if and how you could or could not use those fonts today is not clear for the other ones that I did not create myself.

The Legal Issue

Nobody was thinking about Copyright when they created those things. There was also no commercial intention for its use, it was about reputation and getting known and recognized... "fame" basically. In order to do that as good as possible, you not only wanted that your stuff was spreading as far and as fast across the globe as possible, no, you even helped  yourself with spreading as good as you could, or your fellow group mates, some even doing nothing else than "spreading" or "trading" your work, because that was their position and job within the group.

The problem is that because nobody specified in writing if and how the work that you created can be used by others, full copyright protection supposedly is applied by default, meaning that you cannot do anything with it, without the explicit permission of the artist, who is often unknown or only known by his pseudonym or scene handle, thus virtually impossible to contact and ask.

I made the decision for my art to give up the rights on them and made all of it available to anybody to use as he likes, except to create copyright protected derivatives of it. I basically want to make sure that my stuff stays free, even if you take it and add something of your own to it.

My Most Elaborate Font

Here is the most elaborate font that I ever pixeled. It is very large, or better was large at the time when I created it, because you have to keep in mind that the screen resolution for fancy VGA stuff on the PC was only 320x200 pixels and 256 colors. The font looks small today, at least on my screen, where the resolution is 4.5 times as high as the resolution the font was intended for.

It took me over 5 hours to pixel and was used for a Crack Intro for the PC games release group "Genesis" where I was a member of at the time. I cannot show you the cracktro unfortunately, because I am unable to get it to run and capture (video) on my PC today, even with a MS DOS emulator like DOSBox. :(

I am still trying to find a way to get a capture of it. You can download it here (only 55 KB) and send me a video capture of it, if you get it to work. It can also be without the sound, which I have and can add later. I only need the video images.

I hope you liked my little excursion back in time and also the font sets that I made available for you on Flickr.com.

Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Legendary Commodore AMIGA Pixel Art Logos

I collected over the years pixel art of all kinds, especially from the Commodore AMIGA, the Commodore 64 and the PC (when people still "pixeled" there instead of "photoshop" everything).

If you do not know what I mean, have a look at this post of mine about Perspective Projection on the Computer. It touches the subject of hand-made pixel art on the side, but uses some nice examples and illustrations. ...  whoa, what is this background?! :) special occasions? buoahhhh! hehe... okay now serious again ... I was particular a fan of logo art work, because that was something I did myself. I was never good at drawing or painting objects, people or animals. You only have to look at my ANSI/ASCII art galleries and will see that most of the stuff are logos only and if I did anything else, then the results were way below average in quality. Any of my attempts to draw people and faces resulted in something that looked rather funny, although this was rarely my original intention. So I eventually accepted the truth and stuck to what I did best, logos ... styling text/words, so to speak, just as clarification for the "normal" folks out there. I got around to take my logo collection and do as much de-duping as I could, spending several hours on just that and upload my collection to Flickr.com, for everybody to access freely. I did not include my Commodore 64 collection, which is still a mess, but a bunch of C64 pixel art logos sneaked into the Flickr.com sets anyway. I grouped the logos by title and not artist, creating a set for each letter of the alphabet and grouping all the set within one big collection, which you can access via this link. There are over 2,000 logos my friends, in case you asked yourself how I can spend "hours" on de-duping stuff. :) Okay... here are some of the most famous logos of all time... the cream de la cream... the top of the top of the pixel art logos so to speak. Okay, I think you got it, so lets start with the show hehe. FLT- Fairlight logo by Angel Dawn Ultra famous logo, used over and over again, also on the PC later on, where almost nobody ever did a new one for them, because everybody was convinced that you couldn't come up with a better one. If you have never seen this logo before in your life then I am asking myself, how you ended up at this blog reading this post? Seriously! TRSI - Tristar and Red Sector Incorporated logo by J.O.E. Together with the previous logo for Fairlight, probably the most recognized scene logos of all time. Same as for the Fairlight logo... it was used over and over again, also on the PC, but in contradiction to the Fairlight case were some folks confident enough to draw new logos to compete with this one by J.O.E. and I have to admit, some did a damn good job at it. See for example the other TRSI logo by Peachy further down below.    SCX - Scoopex logo by Acid    TSL - The Silents logo by Barock   Kefrens logo by Blizzard from the famous Commodore Amiga 500 demo "Desert Dream" from 1993 Gods logo by Bridgeclaw Sanity logo by Cougar    HLM - Hoodlum logo by Angel Dawn there is also another Hoodlum logo by Angel Dawn, which has a much simpler design, but is probably as equally famous as this one.   Melon Dezign logo by Mack The "zoomed" or "ASCII style" like Melon logo text became somewhat of a trademark for Melon Dezign. They use the same motive over and over again throughout various Melon demo and intro/cracktro projects.   Lemon logo by Facet okay, not so classic, but there is Melon, so I had to add a logo from the "Anti-Melon" group "Lemon". It's like Ying and Yang. Hey, I picked a logo that uses a ripped Melon Dezign style, okay?! hehe TSL - The Silents logo by Mikael Balle    S8 - Shining 8 logo by Newline most famous of the logos of the cracking group Shining 8. Are there any other logos? I am not sure, no joke! TRSI - Tristar and Red Sector Inc. logo by Peachy from the end credits part of the TRSI dentro "Wicked Sensation" from 1992, which featured also a great and equally famous piano track by the musician Romeo Knight called "Boesendorfer" Alcatraz logo by PGCS Logo from the intro of the winning demo of The Part 1991 in Aars, Denmark called "Odyssey" (5 disks long, running about 45 minutes, if you don't skip parts and single handedly responsible for the institution of a running time limit for demos at competitions at demo scene parties :) )      Kefrens logo by R.W.O.   Anarchy logo by Slash Parasite logo by Splatt   Razor 1911 logo (I believe by Sector 9)    okay, this logos is maybe not so famous, but I had to add a Razor 1911 logo to avoid trouble, so I picked a very old logo and not any of the new PC ones by Zebig, Facet or Kenet etc. :) SCX - Scoopex logo by Uno SR - Skid Row logo by Antony That is enough for now! Again, you can find these logos and over 2,000 other and less famous pixel art logos at this Flickr.com collection of mine. Check it out, it's definitely worthwhile to spend some time there.

Uh... what happened to the fancy background? Mhhh ... I suppose that this was a queue for me to signal that this is the end of this blog post. Okay, so be it!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

SAC Updates and Site Content Additions

This post is already over one week overdue, but I just didn’t find the time for it until now. I have several news that I like to share.

SACtros Complete
When I was writing about the SACtros video section here on my site, did I mention that I was not able to get one SACtro to work and asked for help. Well, I got help and thanks have to go to Ben Garret from Defacto2.net (the PC warez scene archive). He created a video capture of the missing intro for me and I was able to produce the final video with music and all and put it up on the site.

I also found a few more SAC VGA logos, which I put up on the designated gallery for them. The logos I included were created by Kenet, Dream Design and Hetero.

Complete All-Time SAC Member List
I got 2 weeks ago in contact with an active SAC member with the name Dipswitch who is a musician and ANSI artist who joined SAC around April 2002. I got in touch with him via Facebook.com and hope that he will be able to help me with my complete SAC member list. I already spent a bunch of time on collecting data and information. The member list is suppose to contain everybody who used to be a member of SAC during its 14+ years history with information about what they did, where they were from and optional contact information etc. From what I collected so far, were 115-120 people members of the group over time. Not bad, eh?

Dipswitch is also pretty busy at the moment, but I hope to get something going by early next year. If you are a current or former SAC member who wants to help with that list, contact me. I created a spreadsheet at Google Docs and Spreadsheets where I can enable access to other Google accounts for collaborate editing.

ASCII Art Academy Additions
I also extended the ASCII Art Academy by two more articles.

The first article is called "ASCII Art Frequently Asked Questions v3.0.3.19" and is a very comprehensive guide to ASCII art on Usenet. It is limited to 7-bit ASCII art for that reason.

The second article is called "The File_ID.diz File Frequently Asked Questions" v1.9 by Richard Holler. It explains in great detail the origin and usage of the file_id.diz file in file archives for bulletin board systems. I chuckled a bit when I read that only 7 bit ASCII characters are allowed for the file_id.diz, because the PC warez scene ignored this and started using block/high ASCII characters in their file_id.diz files as early as 1993.

I am still looking for tutorials for Block/High ASCII art and ANSI art. If you know about or have any good tutorials about this somewhere, please let me know.

For my German Friends
I also added two more pages to the site, but they are quite hidden and not easy to find. Somebody at deviantART.com brought up the subject and I knew that I have it flying around as text files somewhere. So I decided to put them up.



What am I talking about? The infamous "Szenebeobachter" disk mags for the German warez scene from 1997. They are written in German language, but you have to be somebody from Germany who was active at that time anyway to get the humor. The SB was not taking things too serious. I put up issue 1 and issue 2 on the site. I am not sure if they ever released more than those two.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Vaginal Massacre and Dream Design

I know, the title is stupid, but the first part is the name of a dentro and the second part is the name of a guy who called himself that. I am sure that the name for the dentro was chosen to get the attention of people. I guess it worked, because this Amiga Dentro won the demo competition at Scoopex's CeBit'1993 demoparty held in Hannover/Germany in... right, 1993.

I am sure that many of you also just checked this post only out because of the title of it. The funny thing is that it does not use any offending slang words at all. Did you notice that? "Vaginal" is a perfectly fine term used in human biology and "Massacre" is also not slang. It's not a nice word, but so is "murder" or "war".

Just FYI for the non-geeks who are not familar with the demoscene. A dentro is the short version for "disk intro" and is basically something in between a full "demo" and a basic "intro" in computer scene terms. A dentro is more than just an intro, but less than a full blown demo. What a "demo" and "intro" is, you have to find out for yourself :)

Here is the video of the dentro "Vaginal Massacre".


Alternatives: Link to the video at YouTube.com and Link to the video at Facebook.com this one has a better quality and higher resolution, but requires a Facebook account to view it. You don't have to be a friend of mine via FB to see it.

Now that wasn't too bad, right?

Okay, here are some backgrounds to this dentro.

The prize for the winner of the demo competition was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that just came out that year. The winning of the dentro was a surprise, considering the fact that the "Elite" boys from Masque/TRSi showed up and presented their "Misery Dentro Part II" (links to the video at YouTube), which boasted a lot more effects than this dentro. I guess the marketing plot worked for this dentro, because it beat the technically superior dentro to the punch.

U.D.O. is an abbreviation for "Unsere Doofen Ossis" (roughly translated "Our Stupid East Germans"). It's a fake group that did not exist. The people who did this were actually the members of the East German Amiga group called Remedy. How do I know this? I happen to know the guys personally :).

This was actually the place and time when and where I met one of the (then) future SAC (Superior Art Creations) founding members, the pixel graphics artist Dream Design. He did most of the graphics for the dentro, specifically the most memorable splash page, which is shown below.



He also pixeled this picture using less than 32 colors. Its around 16 colors only. Amazing, isn't it?

Anyhow, I did not know him, but saw him having this image loaded, staring at it and checking stuff with the lens feature of Deluxe Paint.

I said to him: "nice photograph". He turned around with a red face, looked at me and yelled: "I was drawing this and I worked over 3 full days on it!!!".

Ooops.. Well, somebody else might have taken my comment as a compliment hehe. The picture uses only 32 colors, remarkable.

I was looking for a video version of this dentro for a while and could not find it anywhere, maybe because of its name, who knows.

I have to thank "pgtyunbderf", a user at YouTube.com, for capturing the dentro for me. I only had to edit it and also replaced the sound with the original MOD music for better quality.

I thought that this is an interesting story and an interesting video (and picture) as well. Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Perspective Projection on the Computer

Perspective projection is a means of representing something that is three-dimensional in a two-dimensional space, or in other words the representation of 3D in 2D, something we are all familiar with from the computer of course and also TV, photographs, paintings and drawings.

A basic rule of perspective projection is that something that is further away from the viewer at a three-dimensional space is “smaller” in the two-dimensional representation and “larger” if it is closer.

This holds true even for seemingly two-dimensional objects in the 3D world, like a flat painting from the front. Now everything in the real world is three-dimensional, but some things do not appear that way, or at least not much, to the human eye. If one dimension is too small, an object will appear two-dimensional to us.

Axonometric Projection
If the object is really “thick” or “deep” or we know from experience that the object is that way, a representation of the object in 2D is enhanced if not only one side (or two dimensions) are shown, the width and the height, but also the part of the side that we determine as the “depth”. Axonometric projection is the term used in geometry to describe the representation of an object with two or more “sides” visible to get a feeling of its width, height and depth.

There are three main sub forms of axonometric projection, which are isometric, dimetric and trimetric projection. The difference between the three is the angle and perspective of the viewer to the object.

In isometric projection for example, the angles between the projection of the x, y, and z-axes are the same or 120-degrese.

In dimetric-projection, only two of the three axes in space must be foreshortened equally, while the angle and scale of the third axis can vary.

If all three axes appear to be foreshortened differently, we talk about trimetric projection.

Short summary
Isometric = angles for x, y, z are the same, dimetric = only two are the same, trimetric = none is the same. See the illustration that shows an example for each type of projection.

Each of those types of projections were a pain and difficult to master for early computer generations, because the math behind them is very complex.

The Cheat: Oblique-Projection
Early computer generations used often oblique-projection for simple 3D effects, because it was relatively easy to do.

One way to draw using oblique-projection is to draw the side of the object you are looking at in two dimensions, i.e. flat. Then draw the other side’s at an angle of 45 degrees, but instead of drawing the sides full size, you only draw them with half the depth. This 45-degree angle was easy to manage.

Think about a computer screen as something like a checkerboard and draw an imaginable square on it. To draw the third dimension lines, you simply start at a corner, go one square to the side and then one square up or down, depending on the angle. You repeat this until you marked the number of squares that represent half of the actual length of that side. Drawing a proper line if the angle is different from 45-degrees becomes difficult. See the illustration that shows lines at different angles on a computer (click on the image to enlarge it).



The beauty with the simple 45-degrees oblique projection was that you do not have to do any vector calculations. Vector calculations take up CPU time (a lot, because of the needed divisions and work with floating points, something older computers were unable to deal with), nor did you require sophisticated line drawing algorithms like the famous Bresenham algorithm.

The Commodore 64 for example did not have a floating-point unit. The C-64 CPU was not able to do any kind of floating point operations, which was the reason why real-time 3D-animation did not exist on this machine (until much later, when smart coders used tricks to work around that problem to create visual effects that look like 3D vector graphics.

Seeing Pixels? Missed the Anti Aliasing, eh?
Even if you got the stuff calculated and the basic lines drawn was there still a problem. If you draw a line that is not 45deg on a computer screen pixel will become visible badly (the Bresenham article shows it nicely). In order to compensate for this side effect had to be used another, even more complicated method be used, which is generally known as anti-aliasing.

Anti aliasing is a trick for the human-eye, which makes sharp edges appear blurry and if done very well even soft. If this is combined with motion (what is even harder to do), the human eye will not notice this blurriness anymore and the edges will appear clean and sharp as they did when it was a simple 45deg angle.

It is more challenging if the angle is anything else but 45-degrees, for the programmer who tries to get a 3D-object on the 2D screen and also for the artist who tries to do the same thing with a single picture.

Thanks God for FPU and Photoshop
Computers became more powerful and most home computers today have 3D acceleration build into their graphics card in addition to one or more powerful CPU with special floating-point calculation unit. The artists got help too. Modern graphical applications provide build-in features for anti-aliasing. This was done by hand in the past.

Anti-Aliasing by Hand
Have a look at the famous “Fairlight” logo pixeled by Angel Dawn on the Commodore Amiga in a resolution of 320x256 and only 32 colors. There were no build-in features for anti-aliasing back then. The artist had to do it himself by setting additional pixels with the right color next to the pixels of the actual line. I enlarged one corner of the logo that you can see how he did it. Remarkable, isn’t it?

For additional and even more remarkable example of hand done anti-aliasing and pixeling, check out my post about the art by Dream Design from last summer. Yes, believe it or not, all of the images were hand pixeled. No Photoshop was used and no, those are not digital or scanned photographs either.


Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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

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

Dream Design 16-32 Colors Pixel Art (Amiga 500)

I had over the last few days a chitchat with a fellow deviant about his deviantion which required him to do work manually without fancy tools, like it used to be in the old days when gfx on the computer was still pixeled by hand.

We talked about that and I made a comment about my Friend Dream Design who was one of the 5 first SAC Members when we founded the Group back in December 1994. We was still using his Amiga 500 for his pixel art.

He was more restricted that we were on the PC. He had to work with only 32 colors and a resolution of 320x256 (PC VGA 320x200 256 Colors).

I still have his stuff on my computer and decided to show some of his best work, remember max. 32 colors, pixeled. No Filters, so Special brushes, no digital camera, no scanners, no graphic tablet (he used the mouse).

Dream Design made the top 10 best pixel artists on the Amiga 500 at some point. There were a lot more and better artists on the Amiga than on the PC at the time, I just say J.O.E. , Peachy and Angeldawn. He teached me some lessons what I really appreciated.

DD was flat out what you call a Genius. He understood perspective, lighting and shading like nobody else I ever met.

Its funny how I met him. He almost wanted to hit me for a comment about one of his best pieces he finalized on a small Demo party. I looked at his screen with a picture of a chick with her Ass hanging out of her pants and said "nice photograph". He turned around red and said, I pixeled 3 days on that!!!! hehehe... great stuff , using 32 freaking colors only. Here it is, the one on the left. The one on the right is only 16 colors.



To the left is a gorgeous pic that won the gfx compo of a small local demo party in Berlin/Germany and to the right are a few more logos.


Take a look at the logo to the right. This is a Great TRSI Logo. Almost as beautiful as the legendary "melting metal" TRSI Logo by J.O.E.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. I might publish some more of his stuff in the future. If you don't believe that it is pixeled, download it, open your favorite gfx program, zoom in and check for yourself.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC
Deviant at deviantART.com

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.