Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Who needs SVG when you’ve got ANSI?
Presidential election years are great times to work at a news organization. As a designer at a newspaper, I love to explore the cool election maps developed by folks at places like the New York Times or the Guardian. My favorite is probably the 2016 Election Forecast from FiveThirtyEight.com, which is full of cool visualizations,…
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My first ANSI portrait
This summer, my daughter Ludi finally learned to ride her bike. She was the first of my four kids to do it. This dad milestone impacted me enough that I felt moved to try drawing my first ANSI portrait. I have dabbled with drawing ANSI in the past, but mostly lettering or simple icons. I…
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Converting movie clips to ANSImation
Recently I’ve been captivated by the idea of taking video clips and converting them into ANSImations, then making them playable on my BBS. There are other, better converters, but I wrote my own in Python. It’s called Ansify. If you’d like to see the results, telnet to my BBS, Guardian of Forever right now! telnet://guardian.synchro.net…
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Jon Radoff, creator of “Space Empire Elite” and “Final Frontier”
Jon Radoff is an internet entrepreneur whose career has gone from dial-up to “Beam me up.” Radoff broke into the gaming business as a teen, writing the BBS door games Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier for the Atari ST in the late 1980s. He built one of the original commercial games on the internet,…
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ANSI mermaid swims in parallax
I made it into an artpack! It’s no exaggeration to say that as a kid I always admired the guys in the artscene. I saw their work from afar, and they inspired me to dabble in ANSI myself. I didn’t produce anything memorable, and I certainly never tried anything ambitious, like a character portrait. So…
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“From Here to Eternity” launches today
Shooter Jennings’ new BBS door game, “From Here to Eternity” officially launches today, Sept. 28, 2015. As Jennings told me in our interview, he is offering 1 Bitcoin (approximately $240) as a prize to the “the first player to pass through The Coil (the final gate) with all 20 artifacts.” The game will last for…
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