Break Into Chat
Josh Renaud’s blog about BBS history, retro computing and technology reminiscences.
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Detention Block AA-23
Is today the 40th anniversary of the original release of “Star Wars”? Blocktronics is all over it. The ANSI supergroup’s new artpack “Detention Block AA-23” landed today, and amazingly I contributed a few pieces! The first is a new parallax ANSImation of the Millennium Falcon dodging asteroids, inspired by the scene from “The Empire Strikes…
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RS232 WiFi dongle for your retrocomputer
Paul Rickards has introduced a cool new gadget called the WiFi232. It’s a Hayes-compatible modem that lets your retro computer telnet to a BBS. Seems like it could be a nice alternative to the UDS series of serial-to-ethernet adapters.
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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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