Tag Archives: animation

New ANSImation: Star Trek: The Trouble With The Rangifer Tarandus

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In December, I created a new ANSI animation for the holidays called “Star Trek: The Trouble With The Rangifer Tarandus”, which was released in Blocktronics’ “Darker Image #2” artpack.

Here’s a video version of the ANSImation:

But (as always), the best way to view this is to use SyncTerm to connect to my BBS, Guardian of Forever, and watch it there.

So far, each of my ANSImations have been a way to try a new technique in ANSI, whether that’s parallax scrolling, perspective transforms, or whatever. This time was no exception.

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Converting movie clips to ANSImation

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ANSIfied clip from 'The Force Awakens'

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

In the Externals section, you’ll see an entry called “ANSI Movies.” The ANSI Movie Player will allow you to watch clips I’ve converted from films like “Star Wars”, “The Matrix”, and “The Hobbit”.

There are two versions of each clip. One is designed to be played at standard 80×24 mode. But if you connect at 132×60 mode, you’ll be able to see more detailed, higher resolution versions.

I recommend using SyncTerm as your telnet client. It supports 132×60, and also has the correct colors. If you try this from a stock Windows or Linux command line, the colors (particularly brown) will not look right.

ANSI mermaid swims in parallax

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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 I never imagined I’d have anything make it into an artpack. But 20 years later, somehow it has happened!

ANSI mermaid animation

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Parallax-scrolling effect … in ANSI

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This animated GIF shows an animated ANSI sprite walking in front of a parallax-scrolling forest background.

This animated GIF shows an animated ANSI sprite walking in front of a parallax-scrolling forest background.

Every so often I’ve been experimenting with Synchronet BBS’s Javascript capabilities, as I try to figure out how to make a BBS door game with my daughter.

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VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2

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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.