This is a nice, short documentary on ANSI art and BBSs:
https://vimeo.com/341663153
What Is Textmode?
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: What Is Textmode?
#42> It typically uses 256 characters exemplified by the font CP437 I have fond memories of code page 437 (CP437). Code 1 is a smiley face. So is code 2. How cool is that! Codes 3 to 6 are playing card suits. The higher codes also contained line and box drawing characters. This allowed writing simple text adventure games that could be embellished with these graphical symbols. The smileys, lines, boxes, blocks, triangles…
For an example of what could be done with CP437, see Castle Adventure, an adventure game with roguelike elements which used the CP437 glyphs to represent objects and the walls of the castle itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_xhGQbxDPg
Re: What Is Textmode?
#43Does anyone know of a good library for easily making static webpages that look like old BBS ANSI graphics? I'm fed up with the modern web and seek reduced fidelity in order to focus on content.
Maybe not exactly what you‘re looking for, but you could give https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss a try. More here: https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#specialize...
Thank you!
Re: What Is Textmode?
#44In a way, the limitations of those machines made the data representation so cool. These days everything is a flat raster buffer with every pixel being independently settable. It's incomparably more convenient but also more "boring". Same thing with music and audio, we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem. I guess the lesson is boring = better?
Art is creativity expressed under constraints.
Re: What Is Textmode?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nyquist theorem Shannon's theorem -> noise sampling + information encoding. Overall if I understand correctly GP says that audio is recorded without any smart techniques besides the basics. Implies that this is bad because memory resources are wasted. Does not discuss how smart techniques might waste computational resources.
I'm saying something else entirely. Back in the day, home computers did not have enough resources to play music like modern computers do. They instead relied on custom hardware to make noise. An example is the MOS SID 6581, which was on the original C64. Once you have enough resources this is unnecessary, because you can just make a giant sample of the entire song you want to play, and that's going to sound at least…
The Tandy Color Computer did not have such a chip, but it did have a 6-bit DAC (Digital/Analog Converter) that could be used to both sample and play back sound. Yes, it was CPU intensive, but you could get some pretty impressive results (I recall sampling songs, and even playing music with 4-part harmony).
Re: What Is Textmode?
#46Great overview. I would love to see a section added about Shift_JIS (SJIS) art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS_art http://text-mode.org/?tag=sjis-art
Re: What Is Textmode?
#47It's possible to make a full-fledged GUI using just monospace (such as console characters), minus icons. It's one possibility for making cross-platform mouse-friendly system management consoles. It won't necessarily be esthetic, but predictable and reliable, unlike DOM crap, where stuff unexpectedly wraps or overlaps unless you test the living daylights out of it.
It'd like to see someone pioneer a state-ful GUI markup language using it. When perfected, then it could be reworked into a graphical version (variable-spaced fonts) so we can get away from binary API's for regular GUI's. Then adaptors don't have to be re-written for every app language: just use XML calls.
Re: What Is Textmode?
#48No love for Atari/ATASCII art?
Re: What Is Textmode?
#49> It typically uses 256 characters exemplified by the font CP437 I have fond memories of code page 437 (CP437). Code 1 is a smiley face. So is code 2. How cool is that! Codes 3 to 6 are playing card suits. The higher codes also contained line and box drawing characters. This allowed writing simple text adventure games that could be embellished with these graphical symbols. The smileys, lines, boxes, blocks, triangles…
(Nostalgia.)
I had an MS-DOS app calls SCRPAINT which was a painting app for the 80x25 text mode. You could draw lines and it would do the right thing when lines bended at right angles or crossed by looking up the junction character code for the two lines.
Re: What Is Textmode?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm saying something else entirely. Back in the day, home computers did not have enough resources to play music like modern computers do. They instead relied on custom hardware to make noise. An example is the MOS SID 6581, which was on the original C64. Once you have enough resources this is unnecessary, because you can just make a giant sample of the entire song you want to play, and that's going to sound at least…
The Tandy Color Computer did not have such a chip, but it did have a 6-bit DAC (Digital/Analog Converter) that could be used to both sample and play back sound. Yes, it was CPU intensive, but you could get some pretty impressive results (I recall sampling songs, and even playing music with 4-part harmony).
Watching The 8-Bit Guy's youtube channel I'm convinced the Tandy was probably the best DOS computer ever. A shame I never owned one; I went from an XT clone with monochrome graphics (the Hercules card had a charm of its own!) to an AT with a VGA videocard. I understand that the EGA emulation the VGA was capable of was similar but not exactly the same as Tandy color graphics.