Since I began telnetting into Atari ST BBSes again regularly, I’ve gotten interested in VT52 which was the Atari ST’s native terminal mode. The Atari supported 16 colors in low-resolution, and 4 colors in medium-resolution (80 cols).

If you know BBSes, you can think of it this way: VT-52 was to the Atari ST what ANSI was to the PC. Using VT52 codes in a text file, you could make colorful menus, animations, and sounds.

Anyway, a while back I came across this VT52 demo by Synergy from 1992.

I thought it would be fun to fire up the Hatari emulator and watch the demo. I captured the animation as a video so that you can see it, too:

Pretty impressive when you consider this is generated by just a text file.

@online{renaud2013vt,
  author       = {Josh Renaud},
  title        = {VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2},
  year         = {2013},
  month        = jan,
  organization = {Break Into Chat},
  url          = {https://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/01/23/vt-52-demo-beat-nick-part-2/},
  urldate      = {}
}

{{cite web |last=Renaud |first=Josh |title=VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2 |website=Break Into Chat |url=https://breakintochat.com/blog/2013/01/23/vt-52-demo-beat-nick-part-2/ |date=2013-01-23 |access-date=}}