AtasciiTube

This is an experimental ATASCII animation viewer which uses the HTML5 <canvas> element and Javascript. You can find the code on GitHub.

Choose an ATASCII file

What is ATASCII?

'ATASCII' means 'Atari ASCII.' It was a character set specific to Atari's 8-bit line of computers.

The ATASCII character set contained English alphanumeric characters, plus other shapes and symbols. People would arrange these symbols on the screen to make illustrations and art.

It was also possible to create rudimentary animations by using terminal commands to move the cursor around the screen. These animations could then be saved as text files and played back later.

Here are a few places to learn more about ATASCII and ATASCII animations:

• The Break Movie Warehouse, as archived by the Wayback Machine
• Examples of animations at Break Into Chat
• "Atari Toons" article from 1985 issue of ANTIC
• ATASCII article at wikipedia.org
• ATASCII article at Just Solve the File Format Problem
• "Mapping the Atari", appendix 10
• ATASCII table at joyfulcoder.net

Want more?

See some of Break Into Chat's other special collections.

Interested in BBSing, door games, or retrocomputing? Check out the Break Into Chat BBS wiki or the blog.