Slashdot Mirror
X11 in ASCII
ChristTrekker submitted a story that we probably have run once upon a time, but hey, it's a holiday weekend, and who doesn't enjoy reading about a X11 in ASCII graphics? Complete with screenshots and code for you do it yourselfers. I like the enlightenment screenshots. Painful.
its actually cell-shaded, antialiased 3d objects that need a radeon 9800 to run
menu shadows in GTK, and X11 in ascii- what dumb idea will we come up with next, the Windows UI in linux?
oh, wait...
Because we can can can!
It might look dreddful, but I see some applications for visually impaired people. Bigger letters are more visible to people that can see very difficult.
Anyone has an idea about how this ASCII X-server would work for blind people using a braille term ?
-- Cliff Albert
Does it have menu shadows, though?
oww ooooo somebody just *had* to invent something more painful than reading RFC's..... anyone got Tylenol? Please?
C|N>K
While it is realy neat to see that some one is doing things like this I wood seem to me that a standard text interface might be a tad more usable. Why bother using a real memory hog like mozilla when you can use lynx. I supose that some impovreshed people will find it use full but untill it is fully woking (i.e. colure full motion) most people that have low end computers are just going to look for non graphical alternatives.
The resolution's too high, if he really wanted to impress us he should have done it in 320x200 CGA.
Now all my pr0n can be
asciipr0n!!!!
Now excuse me, I'm off to do some *ahem* research...
porn look in it?!
sorry, some one had to say it
Now, since the site is obviously slashdotted, how about someone posting some ASCII screenshots in his comment?
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
Er... It's Slashdotted. Er... Anyone else noticing that? Anyone got a mirror?
Lalala
A new release of OS/2 ???
anyone got a mirror of the screenshots :)
There are mirrors of photos, dumps and the original site.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
88 49 49
The slashdot effect has now been confirmed to severly affect text-centric sites even on slow holiday weekends
my eyees!! my eyes!!!!
My eyes are ASCII-allergic you insensitive clod!
Google Cache:
Main Page:
Here
i would link the rest of the site but it's all screenshots which google doesn't cache.
Runnin' On Empty
Yahoo cacheF www.meow.org.uk%2Fstan%2Fxserver%2F
(google didn't have it... StRaNgE...)
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=http%3A%2F%2
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
...they do nothing!
aalib-based X server
:-)
:-)
How?
First of all, I compiled aalib, which seemed a good start.
Then I found GGI, which acts as an abstraction layer. It provides a standard interface, and will render (among others) as X, svgalib or (conveniently enough) aalib.
XGGI is a patched XFree 3 server, which as you can guess, uses GGI for its display. It'll quite happily render X using aalib.
Last stage was to tweak the text mode. 80x25 was far too small. Each character on-screen represents a 2x2 pixel block, so my X server was running at 160x50. Booting linux with 'vga=ask' wasn't very productive -- it only seemed to report standard VGA text modes (eg, 80x43, 80x50).
Poking around, I discovered SVGATextMode, which will tweak VGA text modes using modelines similar to XF86Config's. Fiddling with its config file somehwat I managed to get 100x60 running, which with an 8x8 font gives me 800x480, the limit of this laptop's LCD. My X server was now running at 200x120.
Almost useable. Time to try some apps
Enlightment, KDE, RealPlayer 8, Netscape Navigator (among others) all seemed fairly happy running at such a low resolution. Some are nicer than others about how they handle it, though -- eg, wrapping menus when they become too large. There are quirks -- the server doesn't seem to recognise ctrl, alt or even shift being pressed, and I can't have a large virtual desktop to scroll around in -- but on the whole it's not too bad.
Why?
It struck me as a nice idea to be able to play DVDs without having the bottleneck of a fairly poor graphics card. aalib seemed like a natural alternative... No luck yet, but I'm still trying
Actually, that's a lie. It just seemed like a cool thing to do.
I've always wondered why people rarely read the article. Now I know that it's because TFA is usually slashdoted before most people can read them.
X
Maybe the screenshots should have been done in ascii instead of jpeg?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
He says he wanted to watch DVDs, and I can't understand why he would need X for that. mplayer supports -vo aa to render using aalib, without all the overhead of an xserver.
I've even actually used it once on a computer that was too slow to play DVDs in X. It was far from enjoyable, but still impressive.
The folowing is just as true of Solarus (closed micro kernel) as is of Linux (open monolythic)
This sort of thing is why you need to let end users edit/replace as much code as they can.
You can do useless but cool things like this while not being bloated with useless and unwanted 'features'
Sealed systems that don't let end users change things around end up having every feature possable in the system and still lack features users want.
But when you let them change things (eather by open source or micro kernel) then you get all kinds of funky cool features.
Even ones that don't really have any practical application. Oh wait did someone say this will work for brail terminals? Well guess this IS practical after all.
But we'd never know that if it wasn't for the ability to replace the X11 system with this funky hack.
I don't actually exist.
Somebody should take a screenshot of X11 ASCII running TTYQuake in a window. :P
We still have two more letter to go (Y and Z) before X can be displayed in full ASCII...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
An Apple campus rep demonstrating Mac OS X a while back showed an ASCII front end to their video player. They actually tuned their terminal to get 15 frames per minute on a full screen!
Now why the hell did they make .jpg screenshots of a bunch of terminal text? Seems like a waste of bandwidth, to me.
This is going to ruin the ascii art scene, you realize? Hehe...
...and here they are, the two *must post* references whenever you see "ASCII"..... nethack and if ATI can do this I don't see what's so strange with an ASCII X11 is....;o))))
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
could do the same thing without programming. PC Anywhere running on a DOS 3.3 box actually tried to render the Windows screen in ascii. It was freaky.
Thank god that technology hasn't been lost!
Then we can honestly say: "No, I don't see code. I see Lucy, Bitterman and Xairo - and they want to frag me !"
Do you get paid for first posts, or do you have nothing better to do with your time? Seriously, I'm just asking.
Good Grief. - Charles Brown
Since the site is hopelessly slashdotted, can anyone tell me whether this was done using AALib? That little library just cracks me up -- especially AAXine.
Colud someone add a mirror or two because it is currently sucking 100MB/min here and the sysadmins won't look kindly upon it.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Now that the site is slashdotted, can anyone post the screenshots as a comment? :)
IIRC, the original port of X11 to Linux was done by Orest Zborowski. I seem to remember reading an interview in which he said that to simplify porting, he first did a 1-bit visual which used the 80x25 text screen.
---You're all I need, When the water runs deep, You're all I need, Now I cry my soul to sleep -- Collective Soul, Needs
Finally a worthy application for my Radeon 9500 ASC.
Beep beep.
So the local coffee shop smartly provides free WiFi, in exchange for geeks like me spending all day there buying coffee and food. I'm sitting there, 1600x1200 screen w/ a maximized ssh session into my devbox, watching parsed packet traces blaze across my screen as fast as MySQL could select them.
:-)
An unknown voice behind me laughs. "Whatcha doin' man, lookin' at porn?"
Perfunctory hello. Evil grin. "Don't you know it." A few minutes later, mplayer's compiled on the FreeBSD system, and what else can I do but...
ssh effugas@devbox "mplayer -vo aa Dark_Angel.avi"
SSH, Mplayer, and AALib: When you absolutely, positively, maybe even desperately need something to watch.
"Excuse me. I have something you might want to see."
It even drew a bit of a crowd
Of course, you might have noticed the Dark Angel avi. Triple-DES or not, I wasn't about to drop Debbie does ASCII in the middle of a coffee shop. So I settled for the next best thing, the Fecal Tootsie Pop...sweet on the outside...absolute crap once you bite in.
Yeah, yeah. Too little sleep, too much Gord. It's all about having a bit of fun with things...ain't nothin' wrong with that.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
asciiMac came about during the 1998 MacHack contest, and rendered the whole screen using colored text..it was pretty quick too even on the slow computer I had back then. "The title of Best Hack and the coveted Victor A-Trap trophy went to asciiMac, the hands-down favorite hack. Written by a team of first-time MacHackers, Alexandra Ellwood and Miro Jurisic's hack wowwed and amazed the late night crowd. This retro-hack renders the entire screen in ASCII art in real time. The crowd thrilled to demonstrations of the hack's artistic prowess as it ASCII-converted running QuickTime movies and Windows 95 under PC emulation."
what is the difference, the graphics look just as good as the regular X do.
http://tuxserver.ath.cx/~durin/www.meow.org.uk/sta n/xserver/
Please use it to make mirrors as well as view the page. Thanks.
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
Would be to use dumb terminals for display! I have 2 HP 700/44 (VT102 compatible) "green screens" lying around that I could use with this hack.
Although 38400 bps might be a little slow if the screen is completely refreshed when the mouse has moved!
BlinkenX?
http://www.asciipr0n.com :D
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
It seems a bit recursive to make ASCII characters out of ASCII characters.
There was a Mac version (or equivalent) of this called asciiMac released for MacHack in 1998.
Since the files on that page don't seem to be available, you can see images here.
I've mirrored the mirror and added it to the link above. Enjoy!
Now what I want to know is what the Gears fps rate was at full 1bit color rendering!
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
g_______________________________________________g
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>_\___|_____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>_|__/_____a
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>_|_/______t
s______/_/\|___C_____)_______|__(___>_/__\______s
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*
The perineum is the area of skin rich in nerve endings that is located below the anus (the opening for bowel movements). For men, the perineum extends to the vaginal opening; for women it extends to the base of the testicles.
Because the perineum is so rich in nerve endings it often feels pleasing to have it touched or stroked. If one is comfortable with being touched on the perineum, its stimulation can be incorporated into a couple's lovemaking to further enhance sexual arousal.
To make stimulation smoother and more comfortable, it is often helpful to lubricate your fingers before stroking the perineum during lovemaking.
As long as the stimulation remains outside the body on the perineum, any type of lubricant (petroleum-base or water-base) will do.
However, because this kind of stimulation is often associated with insertion of the finger into the vagina or anus, or both, a water-base lubricant is recommended and preferred.
The anus is rich in nerve endings & participates with your genitals in the contractions of sexual arousal & orgasm. Anal stimulation greatly enhances & intensifies masturbation, oral sex, or intercourse. A good rule of thumb, when experimenting with anal play, is relax, use plenty of lube (the anus & rectum do not produce any lubrication of their own), and enjoy.
Because the perineum is so rich in nerve endings it often feels pleasing to have it touched or stroked. If one is comfortable with being touched on the perineum, its stimulation can be incorporated into a couple's lovemaking to further enhance sexual arousal.
The vagina is rich in vulvatic sensor spots & cooperates with your clitoral system in the up and down movements of sexual arousal & orgasm. Vaginal stimulation greatly enhances & multiplies masturbation, perienium stimulation, and orgies. A good rule of thumb, when experimenting with vaginal stimulation, is to relax, and use one quart of 10W30 (the vagina produces no lubrication of its own during normal stimulation), and enjoy.
However, because this kind of stimulation is often associated with insertion of the finger into the vagina or anus, or both, a water-base lubricant is recommended and preferred.
[ Reply to This ]
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
YOU F00L 1T
I'm going to try this in an xterm which can be scaled much better than SVGATEXTMODE.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Foolish cowards! Think your Nethack ascii is pretty cool, eh? Well, Angband has supported the Radeon 9500 ASC since it's initial release! Seriously, Angband is a MUCH better game, especially if you can hunt down a copy of AngbandTk. AngbandTK has the same INCREDIBLE gameplay, just with almost real graphics. Angband is based on Tolkien's books.
As far as I can tell from the screenshots they are treating the text console as a big bitmap (using aalib) and then rendering onto that using the standard X fonts.
A more usable alternative would be to provide the console font to X applications - perhaps as the only font available - and then render it using real letters. Pixel positioning might be hard, you might have to round to the nearest eight pixels or something.
The next stage is to make (or adapt) a window manager that knows about the chunky pixels and can draw windows with one-character borders that look reasonable.
If you make a 500x400 text console it's not that different to an ordinary bitmapped display. This is a neat hack, but getting X to run and be usable on an 80x25 screen would be much harder.
Remember that 'text mode Qt' announced on Slashdot a while back? I think it turned out to be a hoax.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
What they should do now is render screenshots of the ascii based X11 screens on the ascii based X11 screen.
I thought someone else still getting good use out of a Libretto cool.......
Anyone know where I can get a 1024 column by 768 row monitor?
It should work well with the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC!
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
an absolute raving homosexual to find this in anyway interesting, usefull or even fun.
.. it's on slashdot. sorry, I forgot.
oh wait
Run it through a text-to-speech interface and listen to your X session. ;-)
My only question is whether it's the person who put this together, or myself for looking at it. Probably both.
That is all.
Should I post?
Nah.
Lets make the world a better (?) place, just this time...
YOU F1NG3R 1T
with a URL of meow.org.uk, you would expect to find cats or cat related stuff.
NOBODY expects a Slashdotting! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless bandwidth usage.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless bandwidth usage...and an almost fanatical devotion to Open Source.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
I mean, this is 2003, let's move on and embrace unicode!
In the meantime I also recommend the ascii quicktime player. Open sourced by Apple!
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Get this lovely ASCII porn down you. Uh, I mean...
Deep Throat
englightenment .... :D
will slashdot still display spelling mistakes if the entire browser is in ascii?
my blog
This would have been usefull back in the 386 era.
Why the screenshots, can't they just post some text files?
Way back in 1998, in fact, there was a *much cooler* hack done for the Macintosh.
asciiMac intercepted drawing calls in QuickDraw and translated it into color ASCII art on-the-fly.
There aren't any great screenshots that I can find, but this link can give you some sort of idea what it looked like.
Unfortunately, Basilisk II can't emulate a PCI Power Mac, or I'd make my own screenshots for you.
± 29 dB
Thank goodness I have that G3 around and asciiMac is Mac OS 9.2 compatible ;)
Small section
Full screen
± 29 dB
That's X, always on the cutting edge.
What this thing really needs is to support transparency. Then I'm switching :)
i don't even see the characters anymore. just blonde, brunette, red head...
How about watching the Matrix in ASCII?
(DSL or more recommended, 4.5 Mb HTML page)
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk