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Information about Ansi Art

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A screenshot of TheDraw editing an ANSI art picture of a shuttle; the purple text blinks


ANSI art is a computer artform that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape codes that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto .ANS file extension.

ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.

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Detailed ANSI artwork from 1994 called a "scroller" due to its length.


The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. Not only did it considerably simplify the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, but it also included a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and transition animations such as dissolve and clock. No new versions of TheDraw emerged after version 4.63 in 1993, but in later years a number of other ANSI editors appeared, some of which are still maintained today.

The decline of both BBSes and DOS users has made it difficult for many users to even view ANSI animations. As a consequence, this form of art is no longer practiced to the degree it once was.

The popular game creation system (GCS) ZZT used ANSI graphics exclusively. A later GCS based on the same concept, Megazeux, allowed users to modify the extended ASCII character set as well.

Trade Wars 2002, a multiplayer BBS 4X game that remains popular 20 years after its release in 1986, used ANSI graphics to depict ships, planets, and important locations, and included cutscenes and even a cinema with ANSI animations. Many of these ANSI graphics were created by Drew Markham, who went on to form Xatrix/Gray Matter Interactive and develop Redneck Rampage and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, among other titles.

Many artists who continue to engage in the ANSI art format frequent IRC channels #ansi and #ans on the Eris Free (EFnet) chat network.

ANSI art editors and viewers

See List of text editors#ASCII_art

ANSI art groups and artists

See

See also

References

  • Scott, Jason. "BBS: The Documentary" (DVD). Boston, MA: Bovine Ignition Systems, 2005.
  • Danet, Brenda. "Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online". Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001. ISBN 1-85973-424-3.
  • "Dark Domain: the artpacks.acid.org collection" (DVD-ROM). San Jose, CA, USA: ACiD Productions, LLC, 2004. ISBN 0-9746537-0-5.
  • Zetter, Kim. How Humble BBS Begat Wired World. Wired News. June 8, 2005.

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Bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to dial into the system over a phone line (or Telnet) and, using a terminal program, perform functions such as downloading software and data, uploading data, reading news, and exchanging
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ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1967 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary
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IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437, often abbreviated CP437 and also known as, DOS-US, OEM-US or sometimes misleadingly referred to as the OEM font, High ASCII or Extended ASCII,[1][2]
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The term extended ASCII (or high ASCII) describes eight-bit or larger character encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters as well as others.
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MS-DOS (short for Microsoft Disk Operating System) is an operating system commercialized by Microsoft. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems and was the dominant operating system for the PC compatible
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ANSI escape codes are used to control text formatting and other output options on text terminals. In this context, ANSI refers to the ANSI X3.64 standard (which was withdrawn in 1997). It was replaced by ISO/IEC 6429, and is equivalent to ECMA-48.
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ANSI.SYS is a device driver in the DOS operating system that provides extra console functions through ANSI escape codes. It is partially based upon a subset of the text terminal control standard proposed by the ANSI X3L2 Technical Committee on Codes and Character Sets (the "X3
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A device driver, or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a computer hardware device.

A driver typically communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware is
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American National Standards Institute or ANSI (IPA pronunciation: [ænsiː]) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes,
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A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. A computer terminal is an instance of a human-machine interface(HMI).
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A filename extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file applied to indicate its type. It is commonly used to infer information about what sort of data might be stored in the file.
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Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise, used to randomize quantization error, thereby preventing large-scale patterns such as contouring that are more objectionable than uncorrelated noise.
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1983 1984 1985 - 1986 - 1987 1988 1989

Year 1986 (MCMLXXXVI
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ZZT is an ANSI-based computer game, created in 1991 by Tim Sweeney, of Epic Games (then Epic Megagames), who later designed Unreal. It remains one of the most popular DOS game creation systems.
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MegaZeux, or MZX, is a game creation system (GCS) based on Tim Sweeney/Epic Megagames' classic shareware game ZZT. MegaZeux was created in late 1994 by Gregory Janson, who formed his own company, Software Visions (now defunct).
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TradeWars 2002, also known as Trade Wars 2002 or TW2002, is a space game developed in the late 1980s by Gary Martin for play as a BBS door game, with later versions developed by John Pritchett both for BBS and, starting in 1998, a devoted game server called TWGS
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4X refers to a genre of strategy game, usually a computer game, with four primary goals: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. A 4x game can be turn-based or real-time. The best known example of this genre is Sid Meier's Civilization series.
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Gray Matter Interactive Studios, Inc. was a computer game developer, which was acquired by Activision in January of 2002. Gray Matter was previously known as Xatrix Entertainment, Inc.
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Gray Matter Interactive Studios, Inc. was a computer game developer, which was acquired by Activision in January of 2002. Gray Matter was previously known as Xatrix Entertainment, Inc.
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Redneck Rampage is a 1997 first-person shooter game designed by Xatrix Entertainment and published by Interplay. This game features some songs by Mojo Nixon, Reverend Horton Heat, Beat Farmers and other Psychobilly artists.
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Return to Castle Wolfenstein (PC) is a first person shooter computer game published by Activision and originally released on November 19, 2001. The single player game was developed by Gray Matter Interactive and Nerve Software developed its multiplayer mode.
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EFnet or Eris Free network is a major IRC network, with over 70,000 users. It is the modern-day descendant of the original IRC network.

IRC clients can connect to EFnet via irc.efnet.
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American National Standards Institute or ANSI (IPA pronunciation: [ænsiː]) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes,
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Wired News is an online technology news website, formerly known as HotWired, that split off from Wired magazine when the magazine was purchased by Condé Nast Publishing in the 1990s. Condé Nast later purchased Wired News on 2006-07-11.
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Byte magazine was an influential microcomputer magazine in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, because of its wide-ranging editorial coverage. Whereas many magazines from the mid-1980s had been dedicated to the Wintel platform or the Mac, mostly from a business user's
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