ANSI art

ANSI art is a computer artform that was widely used at one time on BBSes. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape codes that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as "ANSImations". ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the "de facto" .ANS file extension.__TOC__ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.

The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. Not only did it considerably simplify the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, but it also included a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and transition animations such as "dissolve" and "clock". No new versions of TheDraw emerged after version 4.63 in 1993, but in later years a number of other ANSI editors appeared, some of which are still maintained today.

The decline of both BBSes and DOS users has made it difficult for many users to even view ANSI animations. As a consequence, this form of art is no longer practiced to the degree it once was.

The popular game creation system (GCS) "ZZT" used ANSI graphics exclusively. A later GCS based on the same concept, "Megazeux", allowed users to modify the extended ASCII character set as well.

Trade Wars 2002, a multiplayer BBS game that remains popular 20 years after its release in 1986, used ANSI graphics to depict ships, planets, and important locations, and included cutscenes and even a cinema with ANSI animations. Many of these ANSI graphics were created by Drew Markham, who went on to form Xatrix/Gray Matter Interactive and develop Redneck Rampage and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, among other titles.

ANSI art editors and viewers

See List of text editors#ASCII_art

ANSI art groups and artists

See

ee also

* American National Standards Institute, "ANSI"
* TMDC
* ASCII art

References

* Scott, Jason. "BBS: The Documentary" (DVD). Boston, MA: Bovine Ignition Systems, 2005.
* Danet, Brenda. "Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online". Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001. ISBN 1-85973-424-3.
* "Dark Domain: the artpacks.acid.org collection" (DVD-ROM). San Jose, CA, USA: ACiD Productions, LLC, 2004. ISBN 0-9746537-0-5.
* Zetter, Kim. " [http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67776,00.html How Humble BBS Begat Wired World] ". Wired News. June 8, 2005.

External links

* [http://sixteencolors.net/ Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and ASCII Art Archive] - A web viewable archive of current and past ANSI and ASCII packs released by the computer art scene
* [http://ansinerator.sourceforge.net/ Ansinerator - a PHP library for processing ANSI art and graphics for web design]
* [http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/oem/437.htm A detailed table of the character set in IBM code page 437]
* [http://www.zeh.com.br/v12/downloads/dos437.zip Perfect DOS VGA 437] (direct download): A True Type font that recreates the font characters used on ANSI artwork displayed on a VGA screen pixel-by-pixel
* [http://nightmare.org/textfiles/programming/FORMATS/ansix364.txt Summary of ANSI standard X3.64 technical specifications, based on article in BYTE]
* [http://vaperized.com/ansiexpress.htm ANSI Express] is a freeware ANSI file viewer for Windows, which supports baud-rate emulation, ideal for playing back ANSImations.