[HN Gopher] Bad Apple as MS-DOS Escape Sequences
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Bad Apple as MS-DOS Escape Sequences
Author : andy_herbert
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-12-26 12:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (16colo.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (16colo.rs)
| deater wrote:
| it pains me to have an ANSI animation called "MS-DOS Escape
| Sequences"
| dspillett wrote:
| Were the options available via ANSI.SYS a mix of a subset of
| the standard ones and a few non-standard? If I'm remembering
| rightly there, this may be a more accurate description if it
| targets that exact set of control sequences rather than any
| other.
| fsckboy wrote:
| ANSI.SYS was a subset of maybe the most advanced terminals,
| but it was more or less complete in terms of cursor
| positioning and character attributes so you could implement a
| (unix)curses style spreadsheet or something, but it would be
| much slower and less capable than capturing the keyboard and
| shoving characters directly into screen memory so there was
| not much software written to use ANSI via CON: (standard
| in/out).
|
| The bigger problem was that very few users would have had
| ANSI.SYS loaded and that's out of the already small pool of
| users who knew that device driver could be loaded (in a
| hidden system file, CONFIG.SYS) or what garbled escape
| sequences would look like. Memory was precious, ANSI.SYS used
| some. In a certain sense, writing directly to screen memory
| was much more portable.
|
| my brain is itching now, there was something missing from
| ANSI.SYS... can't quite remember, maybe it couldn't remember
| a cursor position and jump back to it--it couldn't read the
| cursor position... it's hazy, something like, as a result, to
| use it you had to clear the screen of what had been up before
| and use it in full screen mode with some redraws every now
| and then
| pimlottc wrote:
| Also know as ANSI art, which has a long and rich history. [0]
| There's nothing particularly difficult or noteworthy about this
| as a technical accomplishment.
|
| EDIT: Usually the point of converting Bad Apple to an outdated or
| unusual formats/systems is as a creative or technical hack, but
| converting it to ANSI can literally be done with a ffmpeg one-
| liner.
|
| 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art
| cf100clunk wrote:
| I think it might be more MS-DOS specific than the broader ANSI
| Art: DOS 2.0 introduced the ability to add a
| device driver for the ANSI escape sequences: ANSI.SYS.
| Slowness, and the fact that it was not installed by default,
| made software rarely take advantage of it; instead,
| applications continued to directly manipulate the hardware to
| get the text display needed.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
|
| Anyway, rhetorically, art (the payload) is art, regardless of
| the technical means or difficulty.
| pimlottc wrote:
| ANSI art was almost always published as sequences of text and
| MS-DOS compatible escape codes. That's what an .ANS file is,
| and how it was transferred over the modem in an interactive
| session.
|
| And sure, this is art, but it's basically just a file
| conversion. ffmpeg has been able to output ANSI since at
| least 2010 [1]
|
| 1: https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/trunk/ansi_8c_source.html
| capitainenemo wrote:
| It's also possible to output libchafa's nicer rendering
| with a broader set of characters using ffmpeg.
| fsckboy wrote:
| pre MS-DOS, there was a piece of humorous, very low resolution
| pr0n, ANSI/ASCII video art that was distributed on DECUS tapes.
| (Digital Equipment Computer Users' Society) It was contained in a
| file named JACK.OFF, nudge nudge wink wink say-no-more.
|
| I've been searching for a copy of this for a long long time but I
| can't find it in any of the DECUS archives I've found. Anybody
| have it?
|
| it's tuned for about 2400 baud, iirc. The DEC users society was a
| pre-internet sort of open source, data tapes with a ton of useful
| tools, utilities, source, tons of useful stuff.
| Dwedit wrote:
| It looks a little bit like the animation seen in the "8088
| Domination" demo in how you can see the screen get redrawn
| incrementally. But 8088 Domination syncs up with the music.
|
| This one does not sync with the music.
|
| I think it needs to consider how long each frame takes to draw,
| and skip frames when behind. (Or render a partially finished
| frame, as done in the 8088 domination demo)
| nope96 wrote:
| As a kid I always admired AVATAR (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Attribute_Termi... )
| and wondered why more people didn't use it for art. It was far
| more efficient. I'd use it wherever I could, and it would feel
| like my modem got a 2x speed boost. But I'd never seen any BBS
| software convert ANSI art into AVATAR on the fly...
|
| Also, displaying ANSI with ANSI.SYS was completely unsafe, as
| there were codes to redefine keyboard input (i.e. turn F1 into
| Format C:)
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