Show HN: Artpacks.org – Archive of the ANSI and ASCII art scene (1990 to present) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Artpacks.org – Archive of the ANSI and ASCII art scene (1990 to present)

artpacks.org

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My BBS: http://artpacks.org/1995/ice9507a.zip/MA-UNH1.ICE

I was never especially good at making art, but this was my favorite of the things I did make: http://artpacks.org/1995/fsn-0895.zip/CT-ASY.ANS

I feel bad for people who were born too late and missed out on the whole BBS scene. Those years were tons of fun, and nothing on the internet has ever been quite like that world.

I was in GRiM around ~1992 and an iCE trial artist ~1993 ;-) But I'm probably not in any of these packs. I didn't make it into iCE though, I heard there was some kind of Canadian merger and the management changed.

I first discovered all these ansis on Sanctuary in 305. I never met Tempus Thales but I think we lived in the same neighborhood. I got enough positive feedback from my ansis that I went on to get a BFA in studio art.

What was your handle?

-Z-Trasher

I was not into the warez scene but I had some classmates who were. I did ansis for Dragonworld and Asylum, and maybe Sanctuary. The ansi scene was separate but associated with the warez scene (I think the cracking groups paid to have ansis made) if that makes any sense.

I was the sysop of Zap! which was PD/Shareware files, message networks and door games. A BBS was a rudimentary CMS that was like a social network for your neighborhood. If you knew ansi you could customize the interface, especially if you had the source code. At one point I had the Telegard source code (Pascal) and made a lot of UI modifications to it.

There's at least one on there, but it isn't rendering. :(

I'll work on it tonight or tomorrow!

OK I see what you mean, it's in the pack but not rendering. I don't even remember what that is.

I almost made it into iCE when MiRAGE (formerly DREAM? I think.. Shihear Kallizard ran it) merged, but I think I was inactive at the time and I really wasn't an iCE-level artist). But I have no copies of my old art and I have never found any online so time to start digging through these.

Mirage, that sounds familiar. My impression was ACiD and iCE were the two top groups and you had to be pretty good to get in. Everything was tenebristic because of the way the ansi colors mixed (had no idea what tenebrism was) and the subject matter was almost entirely games/comics characters.

Well apparently DREAM (which was a WWIVnet based ANSI group led by Shihear Kallizard) became LTD, or split into LTD and something else.. I was able to find a few of my works for LTD on sixteen colors and they are pretty bad.

Don't forget http://asciiarena.com/

It has the history of Amiga's Ascii scene. 3879 collys.

If someone is not familiar with the term "ascii colly": It was (usually) a .txt file made by a single person. As they originated from Amiga scene, they were mostly in latin1 encoding. In many cases released under some group's name. A typical colly featured 20-60 requested or gifted ascii logos, foreword, index of logos, greetings, respects, some other messages. And of course guest art from other artists (for artist logo, group logo, file_id.diz or headers for "greetings", "respects" etc.). In these text files the file_id.diz was put between @BEGIN_FILE_ID.DIZ and @END_FILE_ID.DIZ tags.

Too bad the site is going down, because the site, as it is today, is consuming too much of the server resources. Some handy web developer could save the site. Currently it seems that there isn't a person in "today's" Amiga scene who had the time or skills to save the site.

Please have them contact the archive team, I guarantee they'd want to at least backup all of this: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Nice work! There's a great presentation from BSides Las Vegas a few years ago about the ANSI art scene, definitely worth checking out if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk

There are still a couple of ANSI and ASCII art groups with quite an active membership. Perhaps the most notable is Blocktronics: http://blocktronics.org

And don't forget Break (http://breakascii.org/) & Impure! :)

That presentation was done by Lord Scarlet, host of the Sixteen Colors ANSI art archive :)

Sixteen Colors ANSI/ASCII Art Archive : http://sixteencolors.net

Fantastic! Anybody know what's being used to render the art as PNGs? Anybody know of a Python library that does the same thing?

I've just realized how much I'd love it if these were distributed as cbz files.

Side note, if the demoscene represents the "high-art" movement in computer art (at least art that originates pre-internet), then the ANSI scene is like the underground graffiti movement.

Their art literally "tagged" every page of every BBS I went to, and being both art scenes, there was some interesting overlaps sometimes between the two scenes (some ANSI groups made demos/intro, some demo groups made ANSI/ASCII art, both had deep roots in computer piracy), but a definite different identity that I'm glad to see has survived to this day.

It's also thrilling to see both scenes alive and fairly vibrant today.

I kind of wish there was a post-ANSI art scene, maybe using unicode, or encoded HTML <div> tags or something equally crazy and inventive.

No PNGs are created.

The rendering engine indeed renders to canvas and was created by Andy Herbert (https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove.js). It was based on a popular PHP ANSI->PNG library called AnsiLove (written by Frederick Cambus: https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove)

Oh brilliant! Appreciate the information.

"I kind of wish there was a post-ANSI art scene, maybe using unicode, or encoded HTML <div> tags or something equally crazy and inventive."

If you look at the early issues of WIRED magazine, I would say that's the post-ANSI aesthetic, but that's just my opinion. 1994 and the Internet really killed off the BBS thing fast, otherwise I think Ripterm (or something like it) would have replaced ANSI because modems were getting faster http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS... For me, 1994 was switching from primarily Pascal, TheDraw & DeluxePaint to HTML, Photoshop & Java.

As far as the demo scene, I was not really part of that but I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that was based more on the C64/Amiga which had powerful graphics/music capabilities way before the PC. So I would guess the demo scene came first and the ANSI "BBS" art was more a product of the IBM PC-compatible world. I remember going to an Amiga club meeting and a few of these guys had big boxes of disks and they would just trade like that, they had limited Internet access through the local university but they didn't have a BBS.

I offered to host their MODs (Amiga music modules) on my BBS. Because of that, I had the largest collection of MOD music in the area. It was like Napster before Napster ;-)

Your information about Amiga isn't correct. In Europe Amiga had really vital Amiga BBS scene. ANSI "BBS" art as a product of IBM-PC world is only true, if you're talking about this so-called "block ascii" that was made using PC's CP437 character set. On Amiga there was a huge amount of artists doing "line ascii" based ansi art for boards (ISO-8859-1).

For example in 1995 in Sweden there were still loads of Amiga boards: http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/elite01.txt

This is the list of boards the list maintainer considered worthy to be listed.

See impure packs for a great example of Amiga style ANSI!

Good to know. That was so long ago, it's possible I just had PC-based lists and forgot there were other lists.

FYI: There's some hidden navigation on this site.

On desktop devices, use the arrow keys, esc and enter/return.

On mobile, swipe to navigate between ascii and ansi files within a single .zip file.

The first code I ever shipped was an ANSI viewer that was included in several artpacks. It's so great that I can still find it after almost 20 years. I really wish that I'd kept a copy of the source.

Funny that this appears now, because I recently decided that I'd like to get back into ASCII art by making ASCII art shrimp. Of course, they are less detailed and smaller in size than much of the artwork here, but that's part of the fun. I started by asking a few people on tilde.town if they'd like to add any and fairly quickly I had a decent collection.

You can see them at http://tilde.town/~owenversteeg/. If you have any to add, please let me know and I'll put them up!

Found a minor bug - files with "%" in the name don't work, e.g.:

http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%CMTS.ANS http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%FRST.ANS

By sheer chance, these were the first two ones I tried, so I was rather confused at first...

Ah, the same with # if in the pack's name.

Can someone explain to me (or provide a link) how you make this type of ascii art?

I've made this kind of ascii art before and it's boring: http://www.incredibleart.org/links/ascii.html

I want to make ascii art like this: http://artpacks.org/1990/acidnews.zip/INN.ANS

See the difference?

I discovered that the characters used in that style are called "Block" or "High" ascii and are only found in DOS! That explains why I've never been able to make that style on linux.

PabloDraw is available on Linux if you have Mono and gtk-sharp2.

Thank you for your comments! I will try this out later today!

Install Pablodraw: http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

Read these tutorials: http://blocktronics.org/view-project/zo-flyingeagletutorial/ http://blocktronics.org/view-project/zv-fonthow2/ http://blocktronics.org/view-project/zv-tutorial/

Then just profit :)

Question: How do you scroll in the years and ansi pages?

This brings back memories. I was never an artist myself but I used some of the scene art for my BBS in the mid to late 90's. I wish there was a way to search based on keywords.

Even the tech is interesting. It uses a JSON API at api.artpacks.org to get the data and renders the art into <canvas> elements.

Thanks for noticing the tech. Its held up under the load pretty well considering that the files are all only stored in their original .zip format (rather than unzipped and stored staticly). That, and its hosted on a $5/month DigitalOcean instance. :-)

If anyone wants to build anything on the API, please let me know (email in profile), and I'll try harder to keep it stable. :-)

Search is coming soon.

If anyone wants to help, the most needed item is RIPscrip rendering. We use ripscrip.js (https://github.com/andyherbert/ripscript.js) at the moment, but the rendering is broken on a lot of files.

Oh, and Andy is on here too! https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andy_herbert

Mistigris ftw, Al's House of Meat BBS was the most eye searing board I remember from the early 90s.

Sadly, I think this along with the 90's BBS and demoscene era is something people born post-Windows 95 will never really "get" because they didn't live through it. It was an amazing lowtech creative era to be part of growing up.

Absolutely. Such good memories from those days.

Late last year MiST released our 20th anniversary pack, you can find it on artpacks.org -- it was interesting seeing everyone back together again (the power of Facebook I suppose). It looks like we might start releasing regularly again too!

Its been really surprising how much Facebook is responsible for the recent uptick in art scene production. Blocktronics has been a huge inspiration to everyone.

iCE reunion in this thread!

Most of my work was loaders (i.e., code, like http://artpacks.org/1995/ice-9506.zip/BZ-COLRS.EXE) and sadly, artpacks.org can't display those (yet) ... but with the recent major advances in emulating DOS in Javascript, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

The one mentioned above had bouncing squares that distorted the pixels underneath in a way that eventually yielded a psychedelic 320x200 pattern. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/VG5ziRP.png

Where's the pre-1990 ASCII art? I first saw ASCII art in 1972. Snoopy surfing and shouting "Kowabunga!" printed on a line printer on the Santa Monica High School's UNIVAC in 1972. Let's capture the older works too.

You mean this stuff? http://artscene.textfiles.com/asciiart/snoopy.untab

At least some of it is preserved in textfiles.com.

Pretty amazing seeing stuff I did back in 1995! http://artpacks.org/1995/fire1095.zip/SL-TST.ANS

I wasn't good, but those were surely some fun days.

Wow. Great stuff. Some friends and I started CiA.

One of my masterpieces: http://artpacks.org/1996/cia40oz2.zip/TE-WETHR.JPG

What did you use for that? POVRay?

Probably 3D Studio or 3D Studio MAX which had just come out that year.

Ah, very nice. For those interested, another site with similar goals that launched last year (i think) was http://sixteencolors.net/

Both have been around quite a while SixteenColors for a bit longer.

Artpacks.org re-launched with a new design and client-side rendering this year.

and http://bbs.ninja !!

haliphax // remorse / break / pen15 / vinyl / simple / the!click / ruckus / punc / etc.

ohh i wonder if theres any PETSCII in there :)

not likely, as PETSCII are actually executables, if I remember correctly.

<3 <3 <3

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