Tag Archives: artscene

My first ANSI portrait

This animated GIF shows some of the steps along the way to making an ANSI portrait of my daughter.

This animated GIF shows some of the steps along the way to making an ANSI portrait of my daughter.

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 drew the whole thing by hand (though I traced the initial outlines from a photo), and honestly it came out better than I imagined. Thanks to the guys in Blocktronics for encouragement. I’m sure my updates on this portrait seemed out of place in their FB group among all other stuff they’re working on.

Anyway, here’s an animated GIF showing some of the major steps along the way to the finished ANSI image.

More VT-52 demos

Ever since I was made aware of the “Beat Nick Part 2” demo, I’ve been eager to find other Atari ST demos and animations that make use of the Atari’s VT52 text mode.

This week I found three more. I made some video captures of these demos as they appeared in the Atari ST emulator Hatari and I include them below for your enjoyment.

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VT-52 demo: Beat Nick Part 2

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.