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.

Comments

That just looks like ascii

[Anonymous Coward]

its actually cell-shaded, antialiased 3d objects that need a radeon 9800 to run

Whoa there

[PhrostyMcByte]

menu shadows in GTK, and X11 in ascii- what dumb idea will we come up with next, the Windows UI in linux?

oh, wait...

Re:Whoa there

[BigBadDude]

Yeah, people die of hunger in parts of the world and what do we waste or times with?
ehmmm...now that we are at it, here is a quote from the textmode-quake page (see also http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/ss/TTYQuakeSt art.html)


SCREENSHOTS
Paul Wilkins, who apparently has waaaay to much free time, has graciously donated two HTML "screenshots" of ttyquake which he created by hand. No, really. He typed in all those little characters while reading from jpeg screenshots I sent him. His mother must be so proud.
The Quake console just after startup
The start of a new game
JPEG versions of the screenshots

Re:Whoa there

[cscx]

I've actually downloaded that and tried it... it's pretty impressive, especially for version 0.3.

I'm keeping an eye out on that project.

Impaired

[dimmu]

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 ?

Re:Impaired

[Egonis]

Not only that, but easier text-to-speech translation with no actual GUI, you could manipulate the TUI(?) to not report any window frames/etc to the TTS program.

Re:Impaired

[Alien Being]

+0 Veeeery intereshting... but shtupid.

Re:Impaired

[supernova87a]

somehow, I doubt that blind people are interested in screen after screen that say "Error 404: object not found"...

Re:Impaired

[spydir31]

I seriously doubt anyone visually impaired will be able to understand anything of the text after it passes through aalib.
anyway, there are tactile displays that can handle regular (high contrast) screens just fine, AFAIK.
Virtouch and ABTIM, for example.

Re:Impaired

[WWWWolf]

Um, first a confession that I didn't RTFA, so if this is different, then I'm Wrong. =)

But if this is what I guessed this was - something like AAlib that directly maps groups of pixels to "nearest" ASCII symbol and ANSI color that (very vaguely indeed) matches closest the cover and color - then this is nearly useless for people with braille terminals. Heck, it's almost useless for people with working eyesight...

Actually it just might work if the blind person in question would be a supergenius that can easily say that "jhejkrhwkjfhskf" is supposed to be a part of a shaded picture, and an end result of photo digitization, JPEG compression artifacts, inefficient image scaling algorithms used in the app, and rough conversion to ASCII. But on the other hand, it doesn't take a genius to say the picture is messy. =)

There's also the problem that the screen changes and that is difficult to describe in speech. So, again it may be the case that the blind persion may figure out that "ehrjhwk#%jfdsk##", after being spewed through braille or speech synthesis, means the Mouse, truly, doth move, but again it's quite unlikely.

Re:Impaired

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting? Jesus.

Let me pretend I'm an ASCII text reader, so you can get a magical glimpse into ASCII X-Terminals for the blind:

"En En En En En En Cee Cee Cee Dash Equals Dash Equals Cee Cee Kay Five Dash Seven Cee..."

Blind user, after 20 minutes: "Wow! That's a Back button!"

Pretty damn useful technology.

Re:Impaired

[MoreDruid]

Ouch... imagine running a screenreader... The horror, the pain...
but seriously, wouldn't a screenreader read every letter out loud? I could imagine this would be an excrutiating experience. "hyphen hyphen hyphen hyphen a a a a a a a a a a a hyphen hyphen hyphen o o o o o hyphen o o o... etc"
Nope, doesn't improve usability I guess

Hmm...

[AntiOrganic]

Does it have menu shadows, though?

Ouch...

[inode_buddha]

oww ooooo somebody just *had* to invent something more painful than reading RFC's..... anyone got Tylenol? Please?

Re:Ouch...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working on a X11 server that burns the image directly into your skin. It's quite stable already, and supports OpenGL accelleration, so menu shadows and transparency comes at almost no performance cost as long as you use the latest GeForceFX cards (which, due to the heat needed to burn your skin, is required anyway). And yes, you may use it to play Doom3 in your afterlife.

Yours truly, the Devil.

cool but banal

[outofpaper]

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.

Re:cool but banal

[leshert]

Actually, it wasn't intended to be useable (or even)useful). It was intended as a fun diversion for the author, and to that end, I imagine it was successful.

hmm

[nomadic]

The resolution's too high, if he really wanted to impress us he should have done it in 320x200 CGA.

Re:hmm

[nomadic]

Actually, CGA would look better you know...

I meant still in text, just in CGA mode. Which would mean 40 character mode.

Yay!

[not-quite-rite]

Now all my pr0n can be

asciipr0n!!!!

Now excuse me, I'm off to do some *ahem* research...

Re:Yay!

[nick this]

Some of us have been getting our acsii pr0n fix for a long time. Here's my recipe:

Install aalib, install SDL configured for aalib ( ./configure --enable-video-aalib), and loki's sdl mpeg player. Boot with framebuffer into a nice display like 1024x768. Set the environmental variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER to "aalib", and you can play mpg video in a console.

I sometimes play (non-pron!) movies on an unused display in my office. Looks kinda cool and matrixy and its funny how long someone has to look at it realize it's an actual movie. :)

Re:Yay!

[CableModemSniper]

mplayer -vo aa

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just downloader some asci prOn. Here I include some:

69 699.

There was also some gay site, full of devil's numbers.

Re:Yay!

[nick this]

Yeah, but somehow it looks cooler in a console window. I dunno. More matrixy or something.

Re:Yay!

[CableModemSniper]

it does work in a console window

Re:Yay!

[nick this]

Uh... that would be easier, then. :)

Thanks.

What's next on a slow news day?

[squashed]

A new release of OS/2 ???

Re:What's next on a slow news day?

[rampant mac]

Probably libgoatse.cxx.0.01.4 alpha. :/

Re:What's next on a slow news day?

[bbh]

Nope, thats the long awaited E17 :(

bbh

Mirrors

[brejc8]

There are mirrors of photos, dumps and the original site.

Thats easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

88 49 49

...In related news...

[pr0f3550r]

The slashdot effect has now been confirmed to severly affect text-centric sites even on slow holiday weekends

aaarrghh

[borgdows]

my eyees!! my eyes!!!!

My eyes are ASCII-allergic you insensitive clod!

Re:aaarrghh

[damien_kane]

My eyes are ASCII-allergic you insensitive clod!

In addition to the narrators for the blind and the large fonts/high contrast themes for the near blind, accesibility lobbyists around the world now have a new option for giving everyone the ability to use a computer...

Join the cause!! Petition your local coder for native EBCDIC support... Stop the ASCII eyestrain!!!

Won't someone please think of the children?

Already /.'d, here's google's cache.

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

Google Cache:

Main Page:
Here

i would link the rest of the site but it's all screenshots which google doesn't cache.

Re:Already /.'d, here's google's cache.

[borgdows]

thank but Google doesn't cache screenshots :-/

/.ed Already

[ciroknight]

Yahoo cache
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=http%3A%2F%2F www.meow.org.uk%2Fstan%2Fxserver%2F (google didn't have it... StRaNgE...)

/.ed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:/.ed

[Dave9876]

Well, if all you wanted was DVD's in ascii art, mplayer is your friend.
mplayer -vo aa

Just make sure you compile mplayer with aalib support.

RTFA

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:RTFA

[damien_kane]

TFA is usually slashdoted before most people can read [it]

Yeah... great idea Taco... give subscribers the site first...
<rant>
Now the site gets a mini slashdotting, and either dies outright, or the admins kill it to avoid the future slashdotting.
Now the normal people who wont pay don't get to see 'TFA'. That doesn't generate more subscription revenue, it generates far fewer readers of /. in the first place.

But, no! Taco swears that non-subscribers still get all the functionality they had before the subscription system.
All the functionality my ass, now you just tell us about the articles, and let us use our imagination (which, of course, years of video games have killed).
At least before subscribers could 'see the future', the rest of us actualy had a chance (albeit a small one) to see the fucking article. Now there is none at all.
</rant>

Re:RTFA

[Little Brother]

I am not a subscriber, more often than not I still can read the articles. True sometimes they are /.ed for a while, but I'm not so impatient that I can't wait a few hours for the excitement to die down. I suppose Taco has made it a bit more difficult for people who have no lives outside of slashdot to see everything instantly, but if slashdot is your life:

1. You really need an incentive to stand up and, possibly, bathe occasionaly, perhaps this will be a good one.
2. You really should subscribe, it ain't that expensive if you compare it to the things you could be spending your time doing instead. (Getting dates, going to concerts, etc.) No I didn't subscribe, but then, I have a life outside of /.

/.ed - here is a mirror of the startup image

[Sabalon]

X

slashdotted?

[Blob Pet]

Maybe the screenshots should have been done in ascii instead of jpeg?

Re:slashdotted?

[catmaker]

Not really insightful. The JPEGs on the site were ones I took in a hurry just to get *some* pictures to show people.

The week after I created the GIFs, which were a lot sharper, and smaller files.

And as to why I shouldn't have 'big' files? Well, who expects a slashdotting?

Re:slashdotted?

[catmaker]

I'm not a fan of animated text.

Re:slashdotted?

[Blob Pet]

um...i was just kidding about that ascii screenshots

Re:slashdotted?

[Anonymous Coward]

No one EXPECTS a Slashdotting!!

Re:slashdotted?

[p3d0]

You're not getting it. Why use graphic files to display text in the first place?

Re:slashdotted?

[mailseth]

Even PNG would be *much* better than jpeg. It would just be my luck still that someone would compress it using millions of colors (instead of two).

Re:slashdotted?

[catmaker]

Why use graphic files to display text in the first place?

Are you aware of how aalib works? It uses as many characters as it can from the available character set (including the top 128). Go look at the screenshots (if you can get to them). Notice how it'll use IBM box graphics, for example? If there's a way to do that in HTML, it's beyond me, sadly.

Re:slashdotted?

[p3d0]

Yep, that's a problem. I wonder if you could find a font that has those characters?

Anyway, it wasn't really a serious suggestion. I was just explaining what I took to be the original comment's point.

ascii dvd-player (mplayer)

[Carl Drougge]

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.

Re:ascii dvd-player (mplayer)

[catmaker]

Yes, then what did I say after that? I did it for shits'n'giggles, and for the geek factor.

Re:ascii dvd-player (mplayer)

[catmaker]

A bit defensive, aren't you?

Maybe, but you lot are so bloody negative about everything. Oh, this is wrong, that's wrong, wrong shade of blue there. What's wrong with saying "in spite of being almost useless, this is actually fairly neat"? That's what I set out for, and that's what I got out of it. If anyone else likes it, that's a bonus. If not, I ain't sobbing.

See?

This is why micro kernel and os is cool

[Felinoid]

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.

Re:This is why micro kernel and os is cool

[eluusive]

This really wouldn't be all that effective for brail terminals. Brail characters are in a completely different shape than on screen characters.. And as you noticed fonts are several lines high here. Might be able to do something with it, but it would take a ton of concentration to visualize anything using this on a brail terminal. Plus people would need to understand what the latin characters looked like.

Games to Play in X11 ASCII

[citizenc]

Somebody should take a screenshot of X11 ASCII running TTYQuake in a window. :P

Re:Games to Play in X11 ASCII

[anachron]

Somebody should take a screenshot of X11 ASCII running TTYQuake in a window. :P

Or Quake 2, textified

...

Re:Games to Play in X11 ASCII

[Chunky Kibbles]

or Unreal Touney ?

Gary (-;

A little premature...

[twoslice]

We still have two more letter to go (Y and Z) before X can be displayed in full ASCII...

Damn screenshots

[LowTolerance]

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...

Don't forget those ones....

[botzi]

...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))))

PC Anywhere and Windows 3.0...

[PinchDuck]

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!

Re:PC Anywhere and Windows 3.0...

[orasio]

You do realize that the "without programming" part makes that PC Anywhere thing completely uninteresting and very far from l337, don't you?

Ok.. (Matrix ?)

[Ruie]

Now can anyone get aalib to render in characters from Matrix ?

Then we can honestly say: "No, I don't see code. I see Lucy, Bitterman and Xairo - and they want to frag me !"

Re:Ok.. (Matrix ?)

[spydir31]

cmatrix has a vga font supplied with it,
aalib shouldn't have any problems with it, as long as you feed it properly. (cmatrix is nice standalone, anyway :)

Re:fp

[Blastus]

Do you get paid for first posts, or do you have nothing better to do with your time? Seriously, I'm just asking.

AALib

[Mark_MF-WN]

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.

Re:AALib

[damiam]

Yes, it uses aalib and XGGI.

Add Mirrors

[brejc8]

Colud someone add a mirror or two because it is currently sucking 100MB/min here and the sysadmins won't look kindly upon it.

Slashdotted!

[wo1verin3]

Now that the site is slashdotted, can anyone post the screenshots as a comment? :)

This has been done before!

[daveho]

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.

Why use jpg's for screen shots

[CatPieMan]

when a couple of

 tags would work just fine.
 
-CPM

Re:Why use jpg's for screen shots

[BigBadDude]

if you compare them you see that the JPEGs are actually smaller, due to the heavy use of
<font color="red">a</font> in the html file

Woohoo!

[Realistic_Dragon]

Finally a worthy application for my Radeon 9500 ASC.

X11 Forwarding Is For Weenies

[Effugas]

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

Re:X11 Forwarding Is For Weenies

[praxim]

I did that at the last PSU LUG demo day with a copy of "A Beautiful Mind" residing on my home computer and my laptop at the demo. We played it over a projector and it drew a crowd- well, once people realized what it was.

I did this a while ago on my Mac

[zboy]

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."

so

[shaklee]

what is the difference, the graphics look just as good as the regular X do.

Full mirror

[Durin_Deathless]

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.

What's next...

[Alien Being]

BlinkenX?

You dont have it yet? Re:Yay!

[bazik]

http://www.asciipr0n.com :D

Re:You dont have it yet? Re:Yay!

[ReelOddeeo]

I thought ascii pr0n was supposed to look like strange green symbols descending from the top of the screen.

The imaging program works for the matrix. Or some such quote like that.

Recursion?

[tuxlove]

It seems a bit recursive to make ASCII characters out of ASCII characters.

There was a Mac version...

[eMartin]

There was a Mac version (or equivalent) of this called asciiMac released for MacHack in 1998.

Screenshots

[eMartin]

Since the files on that page don't seem to be available, you can see images here.

Gears FPS

[Kalak]

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!

competing project

[CySurflex]

I've actually started a competing project to this, three months ago! They beat me to the punch though. Check out my version of X11 in ASCII:

88 49 49

You should be able to do in xterm

[Rares Marian]

I'm going to try this in an xterm which can be scaled much better than SVGATEXTMODE.

But not 'real' ASCII support

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:But not 'real' ASCII support

[GoRK]

Try PicoGUI with the ncurses input/output devices.

Making this even cooler

[seismic]

What they should do now is render screenshots of the ascii based X11 screens on the ascii based X11 screen.

this is great

[Blob Pet]

It should work well with the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC!

How do you make it worse?

[bobbv]

Run it through a text-to-speech interface and listen to your X session. ;-)

Oh my dear God in Heaven...

[frank_adrian314159]

... but some people have far too much time on their hands these days.

My only question is whether it's the person who put this together, or myself for looking at it. Probably both.

NOBODY expects a Slashdotting!

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Re:NOBODY expects a Slashdotting!

[i am fishhead]

NOBODY expects ...

(Screen goes black. White text appears.)

(Redundant,-1)

Oh, damn.

Quickascii

[hysterion]

Personally I find this ascii stuff very limited.

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!

Deep Throat

[Threni]

Get this lovely ASCII porn down you. Uh, I mean...
Deep Throat

englightenment

[sewagemaster]

englightenment ....
will slashdot still display spelling mistakes if the entire browser is in ascii? :D

useful?

[Eminor]

This would have been usefull back in the 386 era.

Why screenshots?

[Performer Guy]

Why the screenshots, can't they just post some text files?

Macintosh: Been there, done that

[SmittyTheBold]

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.

Screw that, I'll make my own shots.

[SmittyTheBold]

Thank goodness I have that G3 around and asciiMac is Mac OS 9.2 compatible ;)

Small section
Full screen

Re:Screw that, I'll make my own shots.

[ChristTrekker]

That's great! And when I shrink it down to 30% in Opera, and squint sideways at it, I can almost make out what it's supposed to be!

Gotta love ASCII art. :)

How long do you actually use your Mac this way? Ever tried? Just curious.

Re:Screw that, I'll make my own shots.

[SmittyTheBold]

Ah, I tried a few times, but I always switched back in just a few moments - you can toggle the display with the caps lock key.

I once navigated the control panel like that just for the challenge, but any serious work is nigh-impossible.

Still, it's one of my favorite hacks.

Some (possible) interesting use of that

[Bilange]

How about watching the Matrix in ASCII?

(DSL or more recommended, 4.5 Mb HTML page)