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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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.

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"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.

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.

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