Dynamic Technologies - Dytec - Introduction Continued

Almost exactly one year ago I did publish a post where I introduced 26 cracktros for the Commodore 64, 7 Cracktros for the PC and 4 Cracktros for the Commodore Amiga by one of my former release groups that is dear to my heard, Dynamic Technologies aka Dytec or simply DTC.

I also created a remix video where I used the majority of Dytec logos that I had and many of the crack intro videos to show off some artistic high-lights of the group.

     ____  _____________ ______ ______   
    /    \/  /  /_   __//  ___//  ___/\  
   /  /  /\   _/ /  /\_/  _/__/  /___\/  
  /_____/ /__/\\/__/ //_____//_____/\    
  \_____\/\__\/ \__\/ \_____\\_____\/    
            C R A C K E D:               

One thing that I noticed was that the few (4) intros that I had for the Commodore Amiga for Dytec, were pretty much all ugly and almost embarrassing.

I was almost certain that there must have been more, since I do recall that we used logos for Dytec that were created on an Amiga for our Dytec PC cracktros.

I always thought that those logos were used first in Amiga productions and were not created for the PC specifically (just like Dream Design did while he was in my art group SAC (Superior Art Creations) and also in Remedy Amiga (and "U.D.O." hehe), still using his Amiga 500 as his main computer and only getting a PC much later).

However, I could not find any of those, when I looked for them last year. I temporary gave up hope, until recently, when I stumbled across new Dytec Amiga releases, which I have not seen before. They also look pretty good actually, nothing I would have to be ashamed of in any way.

Well, I captured recordings for those and would like to expand on my original introduction and list of Dytec releases to provide a much more complete picture of the group.

	The PIT BBStro (1992) Credits Code: Direct Font: Viper Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Cracktro for Dungeons Avalon 2 (1992) Credits Code: Direct Music: Pitty Font: Viper Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Trainer/Intro (1992) Credits Code: Grain Gfx : Orion, Fuzzi, Bart, Amblin Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Lemmtro  (1992) Credits Code: Acromancer Graphics: Magnum Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Ami Expo Invtro (1992) together with Skid Row Credits Code: Paso/Dytec Gfx: Crux/Dytec & Viper/Dytec Music: Vince/Dytec Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	"Bintro in Blue" (1992) Credits Code: Hosot Graphics: Tridi Music: Vince Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Cracktro for Perfect General (1992) Credits Code: Paso Music: Paso Graphics: Viper Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Dynamic Technologies Dentro (1992) Credits Code: Tuner Graphics: Crux & Magnum Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Unreleased Cracktro (1992) Credits Code: Blade Graphics: Orion Music: R2D2 Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video Why "unreleased", since it was obviously made public? Well, it was never used for its original purpose ... as cracktro/crack intro for the group, which runs before a computer game that was cracked and then released within the warez scene by Dytec.

Not bad, eh?! Not bad indeed.

An All-Time Dytec Member List?!

While I was looking for the new Amiga productions and where I could download them, I started just for the fun of it, compiling something like a Dytec all-time member list. I did not take it as serious by far as the SAC All-Time Member List, where I spent a significant amount of time researching (and it is still not complete). What I want to say is that my list makes no claim to be complete nor 100% accurate. However, I think that it is better and more than anything that might be already out there. So here it is.. just for the fun of it.

Handle                  Function            Notes          Platform (A=Amiga, C=C64, P=PC)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acromancer              coder                                        A
Amblin                  graphics                                     A  
Bacchus                 sysop                                           P
Beaker                  swapper                                      A
Blade                   cracker                                      A
Brainbox                                                                P
Brockhaus                                                               P
Christo                 sysop/courier                                   P
Crux                    graphics                                     A
Datacrime                                                               P
Deathwalker             sysop                                           P
Direct                  coder                                        A
Don                     supplier                                     A  P
Dr.Crime                sysop of whq         died in 2000            A
Dragnet                 sysop                                           P
Elvin                   sysop                                           P
Faithhealer                                                             P
FanFan                  sysop                                           P
Fatman                  leader/swapper                            C  A  P  
FCC                     cracker                                         P
Fuzzi                   graphics                                     A
Grain                   coder                                        A
Grizzly                                                                 P
Hetero                  coder/graphics                                  P
Hosot                   coder                                        A
Iceman                                                                  P
Jan                     courier                                         P
Jive                    coder                                        A
Johnny Cyperpunk        cracker                                         P
LBM (Little Big Man)    coder/cracker                              C
Madmax                                                                  P
Magnum                  graphics                                     A
Mainman                                                                 P
Maverick                sysop/courier/supplier                          P
Oliver Stoned                                                           P
Onyx                    cracker                                         P
Orion                   graphics                                     A
Palladin                sysop                                           P
Paso                    coder/music                                  A    
Pitty                   music                                        A   
Proton                  coder/cracker                             C
R2-D2                   cracker/music                                A   
Ramirez                                                                 P
Roach                   courier                                         P
Roy                     leader/sysop/graphics                           P
Shanon                  swapper                                      A  P   
Sharp                                                                   P
Slash                   sysop                                           P
Spoon                   music                                           P
The Clan                                                                P
The Outlaws             courier                                         P
Tic                     coder/cracker                                   P
Tridi                   grapics                                      A
Tuner                   coder                                        A
Turner                                                                  P
Twin!                   coder/cracker                                   P
VFast                                                                   P
Vince                   music                                        A
Viper                   graphics                                     A
Wine                                                                    P
Xerxes                  courier                                         P

And while it is so nice to gather up all this kind of information and publish them here, I'd decided to throw in another goodie as a bonus (or something like that hehe).

A Brief Dynamic Technologies History

... from my Point of View, as I remember it!

1990	Dytec is founded by Fatman in East Berlin on the Commodore 64
1992	Amiga Section was started
1993	Dytec PC Section Started, then merged into TRSI/DRG, which then became TRSI/Faith
1995	TRSI PC dissolves; several TRSI members join Genesis (formerly known as Pentagram). Assault becomes the Utility/Apps division of GNS, Dytec re-emerges as German games division; TDU-Jam is the English CD-Rip division (a German Games CD-Rip division also emerged, but I forgot the name of it). Genesis dies out naturally, since less and less games are being released on floppy disks anymore. Long distance calling across the Atlantic becomes a bigger issue, at the same time ISDN starts to dominate communication at least in Germany. All this causes a natural separation of the TDU-Jam and Dytec divisions, which eventually operate virtually entirely independent from each other. The friendship remained, but you could not speak of "one and unified" entity or group anymore.
1996	TRSI got revived, which is also rooted in Germany. Dytec became for a brief period of time what DRG and then Faith used to be, the German games release division of TRSI. (PC TRSI/DTC (Feb)) This period was only very short lived though and Dytec was once more on its own.
1997	Dytec PC Merge with Vortex and Empire of Darkness to form the new Group Dynasty. The Background Story: Dupes became a major issue, due to the high phone costs that caused the shift of when most trading across boards in Germany occurred to the ungodly hours between 2:00 am and 5:00 am, when phone fees were at its lowest. The major players in the German games release scenes were shattered all over Germany, with Dytec in Berlin, Vortex in the Ruhr area around Essen; Backlash around Hannover and Empire of Darkness in the southern part of Germany. That two or more groups released the same game during the day or evening was not realized before 2:00 am when the cross country trading started. The leader of Vortex, Menion Leah contacted me to discuss the issue. We talked about each groups strengths and weaknesses. Vortex had slightly faster suppliers, but no good crackers. Dytec had some of the best in whole Germany. We teamed up for some trials, where Vortex supplied an original for Dytec to release and Dytec cracked a game for Vortex to release. Those tests worked very well and talks about a possible merger started. Then we thought about an even larger merger. Menion and Vortex had good contact with EOD, to whom Dytec had no contact at all. However, Dytec, specifically me and a long time board and sysop of a Dytec HQ had very good contact to Backlash. My Board was a Backlash site, even while it was Dytec PC WHQ and I knew several of the BLH guys personally and even partied with them (hard). A mega-merger was on the horizon: Backlash-Dytec-EOD-Vortex, but Backlash backed out, because they refused to merge together with the EOD folks for several reasons. The decision was made to move ahead with the merger, even with Backlash dropped out of it. Dynasty was born. The leaders of each founding group became the senior staff of the new found Dynasty. The WHQ problem was solved intelligently by not making any board to the WHQ, but the three former WHQ's of the individual groups to HQ's and former HQ's to basic Distro. Sites. Backlash was the only serious competition for Dynasty. The relationship between the two rivals were mixed. While my BBS remained a Backlash site and I continued to consider several of the Backlash senior staff to be my friends, some ugly flaming occurred, especially between Backlash and former members of EOD on the Dynasty side.  Dytec Amiga and C64 continued to exist.
1999	Dytec PC re-emerged (separated from Dynasty), initiated by The Driver & Shanon. I was retired from the Warez-Scene (I was busted in 1998), but disapproved of this separation/re-launch, but the original founder and highest instance in this matter, Fatman, who was by then also retired, gave his blessings. This revival attempt was short lived though. Why, I don't know, because I was leaving Germany at that time and moved first to Switzerland (in 1999) and then to the United States in May 2000.

Did I miss something important? Do you disagree with something that I said about how the events unfolded from my own personal perspective? I am human und thus biased and controlled by emotions. The human mind likes to play tricks on you when it comes to long term memories and remembering specifics from events that lie many years in the past. I did not do a gigantic amount of background checking and research, but I also did not just write everything straight out of my head as and how it came back to my mind. This said, feel free to leave your comments at the end of this blog post below. I won't bite :).

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC (ex-Dytec)

p.s. While I did a little bit of facts checking, I re-discovered my old email signature that I seemed to have used all the time throughout the years 1998-1999 at least. Here it is :)

     Roy / Superior Art Creations                        .  . ..: ... 
     Email: NOT VALID AT THE MOMENT                      . . .:::::..  .
     WWW  : http://www.roysac.com/            .o$$$$$$$$$o. .:::::::::::.
                                                .  .o$ `$$$ "  `"::´ " .o$
     SAC Contacts                              . . $$$ o$P´.o$$$o..o$  $$$
     WWW: http://www.superiorartcreations.com/   : $$$o$o."$$ `$$$$$$  $$$ 
     IRC: #SAC (EFNet)                          .: $$$" $$$$$. $$$$$$. $$$
     FTP: N/A                                    ` $$$  $$$`4$$$P´`4$$P"$$"
     --------------------------------------------- $$$  $$$ ---------- $$$ -
     - --- ------------- ------------ --------- -  $$$  $P´ .::´  .o$" $$$
                                                   $P´     . :´ . $$$ .$$$
                                                             .    `4$$$$P´ 

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 - 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

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

SACtros - The Intros for SAC Art Packs

It took me a while, but finally are (almost) all SACtros available in video format on the site.

What are SACtros?
SACtros are the intros that were created specifically for SAC art pack releases only. In contradiction to cracktros or BBStros were SACtros only used for one release, the individual SAC pack it was created for.

Features and Interface
You can watch the videos directly on my website via embedded Flash video player. I also provided a link to the video at YouTube, just in case the player on the site is not working for somebody for unknown reasons. You are also able to download the video for each SACtro in .AVI format to your hard disk.

Goodies for Old School Geeks
For the old school folks are links to the original MS DOS executable and to the original MOD file (sound tracker music) available.

The Bad News
That were the good news, now to the bad ones. There is no video for SACtro #2. The reason for this is not that I forgot or neglected it, but the fact that I was unable to get it to work on a modern Windows PC to capture the video.



I used DOSBOX x86 Emu for old PC emulation and unpacked and unprotected the DOS executable. I also found out that there was a bug in Borland Pascal that causes programs written in old BP (this intro was, BP and in-line Assembler) to crash on modern day CPUs. I fixed the executable so that this bug is not a problem anymore, but it still does not work.

Asking for Help
If you are a geek and know some more options or alternatives for getting this intro to run in a DOS Window for video capturing, let me know.

If you can produce a video capture and send it to me, even better. Here is the executable (zipped) in the current stage (unpacked/unprotected/BP fix applied). Just in case, here is the original one, which used to work fine on old machines (just in case I messed something up during my fixing attempts).

Don't worry about the sound. I would mix that in afterwards manually anyway, just for sound quality reasons. Also if the intro runs very very slow, no problem. I had that with several of the other videos too. I did a lot of editing to get them to look like on good old MS DOS machines.

Thanks in advance and enjoy the other SACtros that I were able to record and edit at my website. I also hope that you like the interactive AJAX interface for the SACtro selection.

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

How Did I Become a Wikipedian?

I would like to share my experiences of becoming a Wikipedia editor and contributor, which is also referred to as "Wikipedian". Let it entertain you and also teach you some lessons at the same time. I hope it will encourage you to start contributing to Wikipedia as well and also be a warning about possible pitfalls you should try to avoid.

1st Edit
My first Article at Wikipedia, which I edited via my Wikipedia account (and not anonymously. Which I never did, at least not on purpose :)) was the article for "Superior Art Creations" on 12/31/2005.

Realizing What Wikipedia Is
The article was already there, which amazed me (the sheer fact that it existed in Wikipedia). It also made me realize what Wikipedia is and what makes it so great compared to oldschool Encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica or the German Brockhaus. Wikipedia was not limited in size, like the printed encyclopedias and also not by the finite limit of knowledge and resources the creators and editors of classic encyclopedias have. SAC did not impact the course of world history, but it played a role for thousands of people around the globe at a specific time of the history of Bulletin Board Systems, the Warez Scene and Text Art (ASCII art in particular).

I found the article by accident. I decided to write down and make public my activities and experiences, primarily between 1992-1998, in the world of BBS, warez, demoscene, scene art, ASCII art, ANSI art, cracking and cracktros etc. I realized that knowledge about this history was fading and will continue so, if people who were eyewitnesses of it, not start to record it and archive, before they will forget about it themselves or die. The events back then did play a role in events that followed, including major events like the parallel development and growth of the Internet as we know it today, namely the World Wide Web and the introduction of the first commercial web browser called "Mosaic" in 1993 who was developed by people who later in 1994 founded the company with the name "Netscape", and made Mosaic to become better known as the Netscape Navigator web browser.

I wrote some stuff down. A large percentage was about Superior Art Creations, which I founded together with Hetero in December 1994. I made all releases ever made by SAC available online to the public. I remembered about some material and events which I did not have or in some cases did not have anymore. I was trying to find material online, in the hope that somebody else was more forward thinking than I was and kept those documents and maybe even made them public.

Before my first "real" edit, did I only make two edits in Wikipedia with my user account. Both were edits of the Wikipedia:Sandbox where I tested how to create links, external links that is.

My Start as a "Spammer"
My first "contribution" to Wikipedia was a link to my new pages I created about me, SAC and the Scene back then. If it would have been a highly trafficked article and commercial in nature, my contribution would have been most likely being deleted because of WP:EL (External Links). The content was going beyond the material provided by the article in Wikipedia and was a valid contribution. Fortunately was the edit not reverted, which would probably have caused me to abandon Wikipedia and not continue to contribute to it and have by April 2007 over 2,000 edits of over 300 unique pages, with over 800 of them in the Wikipedia Mainspace.

I continued to edit the article the same day. I first corrected the categories the article was in and added references (internal Wiki links) to relevant related subjects. THEN I started editing the main content of the article and updated and extended it. Since I was the founder of the group, did the edits all fall under the category WP:COI (Conflict of Interest). If you want to check the article to make sure that it follows WP:NPOV (Neutral Point of View), feel free to do so.

Case Study Idea
I continued with adding references to SAC to the "Computer art scene" and "ASCII art" articles. I was a "bad" editor who provided only little value to Wikipedia, but to my defense must I say that most people dont start big. I would even bet that most editors got their start at Wikipedia by doing an COI edit. COI articles tend to have the power to motivate that person strong enough to take the big step and actually EDIT a live article at Wikipedia. The rest are probably only people that are picky when it comes to correct grammar and punctuation. :) Changing the spelling of a word or add/remove a comma etc. requires a lot less courage and motivation than adding actual content to the article, be it a link or a sentence.

It would be interesting to make a case study and look at the very first contributions of a subset of Wikipedia editors at all levels, veterans, newbies and administrators and active, little active and occasional active editors. This case study does not exist so my statements are at this point nothing more than speculation and the believe that my experiences and motivations to create an editor account at Wikipedia and start editing stuff, are not that unique and rather typical.

Getting into Trouble
Two month after my first edits of Wikipedia did I have my first "run into the locals". I edited an article that was getting a lot of attention and also a lot of spam. I did not know that back then. I was still a rookie and did not know about any rules and guidelines and organization of Wikipedia. I just finished a very detailed article about Blogs, Blogging, XML, ATOM and RSS. I wrote that thing, because I tried to explain to a non-Geek already two times without success what blogs are, what they are for and how they are different from simple News pages that are being created by a news module of a content management system. I also tried to make that person understand what so cool is about content syndication via RSS. I spent a lot of time on that thing and was actually pretty proud of myself and the result.

I thought that the version of the article about "Blogs" at Wikipedia failed to explain what a Blog really is. I still think that it lacks that ability, but I have too much on my table already to even start messing with that article. Anyhow, I decided to add a link to my article, which was originally posted as a blog post at another site of mine, to the "Blog" article at Wikipedia. All hell broke loose after I did it. See the discussion at the articles talk page and also at the talk page of one of the editors called "Monkeyman" who is part of the Wikipedia: Spam project that fights the countless more or less successful attempts to spam Wikipedia.

Reflection
Looking back, I admit that I was wrong. I learned a lot from it though, because it was the first time that I had interaction with other Wikipedians. Others that cared about Wikipedia. I'd like to highlight the statements of one particular editor with the name Rhobite. I will have another contention with him in a dispute about the content of another article.

He is a perfect example of a very fair, honest and caring Wikipedian, which you should take as an example to follow. It might sounds funny after all the "nice" conversations we had. What shows his character the best are the facts that he edited and improved content, which I added to an article with a subject, which he is certainly not a big fan of and a great example of WP:WFTE (Writing for the enemy) and also his ability to change his opinion about something after some changes to the environment surrounding the subject.

He did teach me back in February 2006 a valuable lesson, which I would to share, because it is a very good explanation of some aspects of what Wikipedia is and what it is not (WP:NOT)

"Nobody is forcing you to contribute to Wikipedia or support the cause of free content, but please dont expect to write external content and add it to Wikipedia as a link. Wikipedia has almost a million articles, which shows that many people do not mind contributing to free content projects. Your criticisms are similar to the ways that Microsoft and other commercial software vendors criticized open source software.. they said that no good developer would ever work for free. But the success of projects like Firefox and Apache -- and Wikipedia -- shows that the open source model has merit. I hope youll consider sticking around and improving Wikipedia."

I did ask him to do an Editor Review on me. I hope he will do me that favor.

Other Influential People
The second person that had strong influence on me regarding Wikipedia was the editor and Wikipedia admin that created the Superior Art Creations article. His name is Christian Wirth aka RaD Man who was the founder of the big and popular artscene group called ANSI Creators in Demand (ACiD).

He noticed my edits of the Superior Art Creations article and found my contact information via references from my Wikipedia user pages. I wrote about this already in February 2006 in this blog post.

He did teach me a lot about how Wikipedia works and also gave me tips to specific issues I encountered. Our paths never crossed at Wikipedia itself as far as I know, except for the fact that we edited both the SAC article. I showed him discussions I was involved in, but never entered them to support me. I guess he is a good admin, because he did not help me by joining discussions, but by showing me guides and mechanisms available at Wikipedia. He knows that joining a discussion only because I am involved would be full of bias and personal conflicts. He could not be fair and neutral, if one of his "buddies" is part of a group that represents one side of the argument.

I edited to-date a large number of articles, which are with a few exceptions all either related to internet marketing or to text art and my scene days as Roy/SAC. I also created 9 new articles already and plan to create more in the future.

Conclusion and Encouragement
I hope that my story will encourage you to consider to contribute to Wikipedia yourself. I strongly recommend to get started by working on articles to a subject that are not commercial. Dont start editing articles about your business or company. That can go awfully wrong. Start with something you like and do as a hobby. Always remember the little tab labeled "edit" at the top of each article at Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anybody can edit.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Year 2006 Review and Apologies

The year 2006 is history now and I am not sure If I did more than I did not do, but wanted to. The final count is not in yet, well, I might just add it to my to-do list for 2007 and let it slip into the 2007 "things I did not do, but wanted to" list. That would solve the problem just nicely.

My appologies to:

• "Buzifer" for not doing the requested "KiDS" ASCII


• "Messiah" for not doing the requested "HiDDDEN RAGE" ASCII art


• "Ian" for not doing the requested "MisterH" ASCII


• "Volcom V" for not doing the requested "Volcom V" ANSI


• Michael for not doing the requested "BUMSEN" ASCII (for all the Germans out there, it is not what you think. They are danish and the word "Bumsen" has a different meaning there :) )

I am also sorry for having turned down the requests for ShAdY, iCU and Synthetica OrganizationSee it from the bright side boys, you did not make it on to the list of people I have to apologize to :)

I also apologize to "Idiana" who is doing a great job at kicking some lazy butts over at SAC and keep the boys going somehow. I have all SAC NFO's already added to the SAC WIKI and then the damn thing crashed on me. I just did not get around to check what the problem is. Actually I did for 1 hour or so, but was not able to figure it out. I did not want to wipe it because of the content I already created.

But hang in there. We will get the content for a new official SAC Website with detailed Group and Member history together somehow. I only feel half as bad because of the fact, that things seemed to be "slow" on your end as well. There was not much movement on the current site, design-wise and other content.

It was great that I got the RoySAC.com site up and all my artwork. That is at least something. The design of the site has a lot of room for improvements and I will do something for it when I get around to it.
I got around to create the cRO article at Wikipedia. At least something that was finished :)

Lets see how 2007 turns out. I still feel like being robbed of a few months in 2006. I still can't believe that the whole year is already over.

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

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.

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?

How things happen such as this Blog

It is sometimes funny how things happen in life and take unexpected turns, trigger a chain reaction you did not expect to happen when you started something for a complete different reason. Exactly this happened when I did the redesign of my families Homepage Cumbrowski.com between Christmas and New Year.

It was only a single page with a family photo, Family Members Names and contact Information plus some text talking a bit about me, my move to the United States and my private business Venture ConsumerMatch.com. I decided to create a separate page for every member of the family including a page just about me. I put on my page the content I already had and started extending it a bit to include more about my past and the time when I was still living in Germany.

My time as ASCII & ANSI Artist with the pseudonym "Roy/SAC", my BBS Closed Society suddenly came back into my mind. It was back then "my life" and not just a "hobby". I was very serious about it and dedicated not only the biggest piece of my spare time for it but also a big chunk of my income as student and later salary. I realized that this was a topic I should create at least one page just for itself. So I started one at www.Cumbrowski.com/RoySAC/ which was moved to its own website in 07/2006 to RoySAC.com (edited 12/2006)

When I started writing the content, talking about people, groups and locations a began to do searching for them on the Net to see if I can find useful related stuff, Screenshots, Dates etc. and also to see what people I knew from back then are doing today. It was all very interesting and exiting. A trip back in time bringing back more and more memories. The dedicated Page became oviously a bit bigger than intended.

Since the Internet and how to make other people that are interested find your stuff was nothing new to me did I start looking for appropriate places to get a link added to my new Page that I did not have to wait that mighty Google will be so kind to add it to its index in 3-6 months, maybe.

I started at Wikipedia because somebody already created an entry there about "my" Group Superior Art Creations.

Heck, I was the founder of it so I had no problem to add a Link to the me, the Founders Homepage there. I also updated the content of the Wikipedia entry with some information that were missing. I also updated Topics like "ASCII Art", "ANSI Art", "Bulletin Board System" and "Computer Art Scene". I was amazed about the Amount of Inforation already collected and provided by Wikipedia. New sites like Wikipedia which are based on "folksonomy*" are a great thing because its a living thing created by millions of people and not a "Algorythm" based or "Business" driven collection of information.

* Folksonomy - "a portmanteau word combining "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web" (from Wikipedia).

I then turned to DMOZ (OPT or Open Directory Project). I made only bad experiences with them in the past when it came to register my commercial website projects because of the general hate of most DMOZ Editors towards anything that smells like commerce and marketing. I felt more confident this time, because my page was as NOT commercial as one can be.

I registered the page at the "ASCII Art" category at DMOZ and got surprisingly fast a response back from the editor responsible for this category with the name "shedragon" and real name Laura. "Where is the ASCII art?" was the question. I only had some thumbs with links to the bigger image of ASCII & ANSI "Screenshots" on my page until then and responded that to Laura (who probably had images turned off when browing my page). I also added some real ASCII's of mine to the email to prove that I know what I am talking about and do know my stuff when it comes to ASCII, something I took great pride in and nothing to fool around with.

We began an email conversation about ASCII in general. She was doing some ASCII herself but was involved in a different area of the Text Art Scene than I was. I was active in the what's called "Underground Art Scene" and she in the more "public" Scene with known Spokespersons like Joan G. Stark and others. Those email conversation made me extending the content of my page to talk also about the "Underground Art Scene" in gerneral and their distinct styles which differ significantly from the styles of the public Text Art Scene due to the different applications of each type of Art. She added my Page eventually to the Artist Category, which is a subcategory at /Arts/Visual Arts/ASCII Art/Artists/

I went of to spread the knowldge about Underground Text Art and created a Lense dedicated to it at Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/ascii/ which allows people to create "Lenses". Lenses are "one person's (lensmaster's) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It's a place to start, not finish. (from Squidoo.com)"

I also put Art Examples up at Flickr, a great place where you can store pictures for free and make them available to be searched for and looked at by anybody if you want to.

All this activities drove of course some highly targeted traffic from people intersted in ASCII Art and people that where active in that Scene as I was. This was great, because this was the original intention and purpose of the whole thing. I got an email one day from Christian Wirth with subject "so..." and one sentence without introduction or signature "you do realize, that you live like 60 min from me now.".

I was thinking "who is this?" and checked the email header in Outlook. Sender Email: radman@acid.org. Radman, the Founder of the fellow and biggest underground Art Group ever called ACID - Ansi Creators In Demand (ACiD.org). I did not realize that he was living in San Jose (2 hours from where I am living now btw. hehe). We only had brief communication before once, years back on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We planned to get personally in touch when I get to go to San Jose or if he passes by Fresno one day. I am already looking forward to this. It's always a good thing to be able to share memories with people who experienced the same thing and treasure those memories as much as you do.

All this eventually made me start this blog and I hope that this blog and my Site will allow me to connect to more and more people from the past who I mostly only got to know by their nick name and never met in person and outside the activities of the "Scene". I also hope this will help me to re-connect with friends in Germany and Europe I actually did meet and got to know personally more or less well.

cu around
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Note: Updated 12/22/2006 - Moved Site mentioned and links fixed

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