[HN Gopher] Amiga ASCII Art
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       Amiga ASCII Art
        
       Author : california-og
       Score  : 198 points
       Date   : 2023-10-22 05:45 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
        
       | phs318u wrote:
       | Couldn't wipe the smile from this old man's face scrolling down
       | the production part of the thesis.
        
       | nmg wrote:
       | I forgot there were column/line restrictions on FILE_ID.DIZ files
        
       | kleiba wrote:
       | Note to the tldr; crowd: scroll down to the final "colly", a long
       | scroll of ASCII art, which is well worth reading. It's extremely
       | impressive.
        
         | nielsbot wrote:
         | it's inspired art
        
       | bronikowski wrote:
       | I've spent many nice evenings reading collies sent to me on disk
       | by demoscene friends. Ah, it was so long ago...
        
       | markx2 wrote:
       | The ASCII art I best remember was in Usenet signatures.
       | 
       | Elaborately done, usually to represent their username and HUGE.
       | 
       | I would snip conversations where appropriate but never an ASCII
       | sig. They were just too good.
        
         | nathell wrote:
         | There's an online museum of signatures collected from the
         | Polish Usenet here: https://hell.pl/nina/newssigs/newssigs.htm
        
         | anthk wrote:
         | alt.ascii-art it's still alive.
         | 
         | Also, gopher://ascii.mozz.us:7070/1/ has some links to art.
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | In addition to BBS, online text file, and earlier computer ASCII
       | art, there was also IRC, where ASCII art would typically fit
       | within a few lines.
       | 
       | Sometimes there were add-on scripts for IRC clients to generate
       | these.
       | 
       | I got carried away with an IRC client I wrote, and added a bunch
       | of ASCII art as standard commands. For example, one command would
       | send ASCII art of an airplane towing a banner with the user-
       | provided message.
        
       | smokel wrote:
       | Figure 12 illustrates how infuriatingly bad ASCII art looked on
       | the IBM PC.
       | 
       | I used to run a utility in my AUTOEXEC.BAT that installed the
       | Amiga font in the character ROM, but it still felt like we PC
       | guys missed out on most of the cool stuff. And guess who won?
        
         | hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
         | Very true, we did miss out. The Amgia folks were sure to let us
         | know about it any time we went to a BBS meet too! I did all my
         | BBSing on a DOS PC. There was cool "newschool" ASCII and ANSI
         | art designed for PCs too. At the time it felt magical opening
         | up an art pack or a demo with chiptune music. Experiencing the
         | underground coding and art scene definitely influenced my life
         | a lot.
        
       | monitron wrote:
       | Wow, thank you for this. Today I learned why the slash-and-
       | underscore ASCII art I came across looked so underwhelming on my
       | PC, and that others were seeing it in all its glorious cohesion.
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | The profile a person (in the final colly and elsewhere in the
       | article) is at least from 1948. "The Boy Mechanic" featured an
       | article on "keyboard art" with the same profile in the lower-
       | right corner of the page:
       | 
       | https://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/keyboard-art.jp...
        
         | california-og wrote:
         | Good eye! I can't remember what was my initial inspiration
         | (could have been the one you linked), but there is also a very
         | similiar character in Pitman's typewriter manual (1893) which
         | is featured in Barrie Tullett's Typewriter Art: A Modern
         | Anthology.
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/readermeter/status/570459976759676928
        
       | jlundberg wrote:
       | So cool and happy this is hitting the HN front page. :)
       | 
       | For more amiga ascii, have a look at the group impure which keeps
       | releasing new art to this date:
       | 
       | https://16colo.rs/group/impure
        
       | berenddeperend wrote:
       | I had never heard of collies before, this was fascinating! I'm
       | very impressed with the finished product. The 'Baltic slime'
       | graphic in particular was great.
        
       | 01100011 wrote:
       | Does anyone remember the name of the 1-bit, bitmapped art you
       | could get in the Amiga terminal? I seemed to remember you would
       | just cat a text file and graphics would appear.
        
         | xmm wrote:
         | Yes. The Amiga text terminal allowed you to shift the top and
         | left margin by single pixels using escape codes. After
         | shifting, writing new text would not overwrite pixels outside
         | the character cell, so by writing a line of text, and then
         | shifting the margin down one pixel, writing another line of
         | text, etc. you could get a complete bitmap image displayed.
        
           | 01100011 wrote:
           | Thank you! I wish I knew what the technique was called. I'd
           | love to see some old screenshots.
        
       | damieng wrote:
       | Surprised an article of this depth didn't mention that the Topaz
       | font changed between Kickstart 1 and 2.
        
       | hypercube33 wrote:
       | I've always loved ASCII art and always get a bug to go hunt some
       | old textfile down with really creative stuff in it just as a
       | comfort thing I think.
       | 
       | also let's point out the awesome design aesthetic this site has,
       | wow!
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-23 09:01 UTC)