AtasciiTube

A collection of vintage ATASCII animations from Atari 8-bit BBSes

By Josh Renaud, April 2016

Explore our collection of dozens of ATASCII animations using my experimental HTML5 ATASCII animation viewer. To learn more about ATASCII, please see the background information below.

Choose a modem speed

(300-2400 bps were typical at the time, but may feel slow today)

Upload an ATASCII animation

Choose an ATASCII file

Keyboard commands

During playback, pressing the following keys will perform special functions:

[P]
Capture the screen and generate a PNG image to save.
[C]
Start or stop capturing the animation, An animated GIF will be generated.
[Esc]
Stop playback.
[Left]
Step backward one frame. (Only available in diagnostic mode)
[Right]
Step forward one frame. (Only available in diagnostic mode)

What is ATASCII?

'ATASCII' means 'Atari ASCII.' It was a character set specific to Atari's 8-bit line of computers.

The ATASCII character set contained English alphanumeric characters, plus shapes and other semigraphical symbols. People would arrange these symbols on the screen to make illustrations and art.

It was also possible to create rudimentary animations by using terminal commands to move the cursor around the screen. These animations could then be saved as text files and played back later.

Here are a few places to learn more about ATASCII and ATASCII animations: