What Is Textmode?

http://polyducks.co.uk/what-is-textmode/

by memorable • 3 years ago

170 45 3 years ago

polyducks.co.uk

rolandf• 3 years ago

That make me think about Textual python library. And in my teen years I used TheDraw app for ascii/ansi art and animations for my RemoteAccess BBS.

qsort2• 3 years ago

In 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?

henriquecm8• 3 years ago

I think at the time they were considered boring too, but now they are considered novel/unusual, which is more fun.

Aardwolf• 3 years ago

Yes, imposing restrictions can result in awesome and creative art! E.g. using a small (e.g. 16-color) color palette for pixel art, making art using semi-graphics block characters, music with mod trackers, ...

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

I've had a lot of fun fiddling with pico-8 (https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php), a virtual console with its own code, graphics and music/sound editor - heavily restricted (in terms of e.g. amount of code and graphics, it's designed so that games fit in an image file), maybe a bit more advanced than a Gameboy.

But being restricted like that made it feel more free. Don't need to think about function or variable names too much since only two dozen characters fit on screen. Graphics, just click some pixels until it looks like something.

But it's powerful enough to make games like Celeste (https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145) or even 3D games and demoscene things.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

we have enough RAM to waste to let Nyquist-Shannon take care of the problem.

sorry what is this?

gostsamo• 3 years ago

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.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

Art is creativity expressed under constraints.

pbronez• 3 years ago

Lovely post. It’s need to see how many speciality editors there are for various flavors of Textmode graphics.

This also stood out to me:

The creation and refinement of analogue-to-textmode filters is an art in itself closer aligned to generative art than textmode art. Depending on the textmode restriction, communities may have strong opinions against using filters (specifically in ANSI where it has a bumpy cultural history). Premade filters are sometimes used as a starting point for further refinement into textmode art.

This is exactly the GenerativeAI / AI Art debate. Apparently the TextMode community hit it earlier because their medium is lower fidelity.

cbm-vic-20• 3 years ago

RIP telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

dmd2• 3 years ago

If you want your mind truly blown, try telnet 1984.ws (if it looks scrambled, fuss with your color/escape sequence support - it's finicky).

worthless-trash• 3 years ago

Do you have a screenshot so I know when I have it right ?

thanatropism• 3 years ago

whaat

kleiba• 3 years ago

Still works for me (just checked).

pietroppeter• 3 years ago

Here you can mix ansi and midi: https://ansiwave.net/

And it is an old project but a rather recent one, also featured on HN, see eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29671889

venamresm__• 3 years ago

Got to mention https://16colo.rs/

bronikowski• 3 years ago

Thanks, I didn't knew about that. Into my RSS it goes!

worldsavior• 3 years ago

I thought he talks about textmode in DOS :D

the_af2• 3 years ago

There are still PETSCII art groups, some in facebook. I find them pretty impressive.

PETSCII was the first kind of computer art I made as a kid (but I didn't know how to save it to tape, so it was also ephemeral).

ale42• 3 years ago

Note that ANSI is not BBS-specific and was not _created_ for BBSs... it was already around and BBSs made heavy use of it.

EDIT: what I find is missing on the post is Teletext art (see e.g., http://teletextart.co.uk/)

Scubabear68• 3 years ago

Right, it was for controlling terminals originally.

I recall in the early 90s I worked for an ag chemical company as an intern. They had a horrid budgeting app written on some old crusty DB platform, I was asked to make the text interface “better”.

We accessed via VT terminal emulators, so I created a library of ANSI drawing primitives and created a primitive window / menu system out of it. It blew everyone’s mind at the time, but it was only a couple of week’s work.

* Edited to add a lot of DOS software and terminal stuff did similar things, including some nifty Terminate and Stay Resident utilities (TSR!).

JackFr• 3 years ago

I used to be a big fan of giant ASCII art in log files, and I still like to include a big banner on server startup, but most of the cloud logging solutions like Splunk and the ELK stack don’t really handle big ASCII pictures in the middle of the log.

I was working at a big bank about ten years ago where we had a half-assed poorly implemented compute grid — some customization of a terrible IBM product. For viewing logs across all machines we had a home grown web app which would allow you to navigate through them. I realized the app didn’t sanitize the log output for display, and I started to include animated gifs and memes into my error messages. My boss told me to cut it out, I said, no, someone should fix the log viewer. It took me about an hour to fuzz inputs on our customer facing application that would generate a server error log which could execute arbitrary JavaScript on our machines. The log viewer got fixed.

AndyMcConachie2• 3 years ago

Does 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.

danhau• 3 years ago

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...

AndyMcConachie2• 3 years ago

Thank you!

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

ASCII art is not always made using a monospace font. On platforms where a large proportion of users are using the same font face and size, that font can be used.

Great page!

layer8• 3 years ago

There’s a whole genre of PETSCII games. For example, a PETSCII version of Lemmings: https://c64online.com/c64-games/petscii-lemmings/

A couple of games with more impressive PETSCII graphics, and some background info about PETSCII, in this video: https://youtu.be/3Sv_TM4WwC0

susam• 3 years ago

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, etc. could be used to add character to a text adventure game.

Shameless plug: I recently wrote a small toolkit to render CP437 characters on a HTML5 canvas for a retro-style game project I was working on.

Source: https://github.com/susam/pcface

Demo: https://susam.github.io/pcface/src/demo.html

bitwize• 3 years ago

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

billpg• 3 years ago

(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.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

"The restriction of textmode is often what lends it its flavour. Having more or increasingly detailed characters in your font may not always give the best results."

Textmode is not only for art.

I am typing this comment from textmode.

All scripts and programs I write are also done in textmode.

It has been said that programming can be art.

tacticaldev• 3 years ago

ANSI/Ascii Art will always hold a special place in my heart. The Good ol' WaReZ days and of course my more embarrassing AOL Punters/Progs scene years from my early tweens.

saulpw• 3 years ago

The recent Hanukkah of Data puzzles have some truly excellent "Unicode art" (using more than just ASCII chars).

https://hanukkah.bluebird.sh

(source: I am the creator of Hanukkah of Data)

hnarn• 3 years ago

This page uses a self-signed cert, not every day you see that in the age of letsencrypt.

AntoniusBlock• 3 years ago

This is a nice, short documentary on ANSI art and BBSs: https://vimeo.com/341663153

nagonago• 3 years ago

Great 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

tabtab• 3 years ago

It'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.

glonq• 3 years ago

No love for Atari/ATASCII art?

What Is Textmode?

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