Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

X11 in ASCII

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-the-hell-not dept.

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.

48 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. That just looks like ascii by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Whoa there by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    oh, wait...

    1. Re:Whoa there by BigBadDude · · Score: 4, Funny

      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

  3. Impaired by dimmu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Impaired by Alien+Being · · Score: 4, Funny

      +0 Veeeery intereshting... but shtupid.

    2. Re:Impaired by supernova87a · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    3. Re:Impaired by spydir31 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Impaired by WWWWolf · · Score: 2, Informative
      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.

    5. Re:Impaired by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

    6. Re:Impaired by MoreDruid · · Score: 3, Funny

      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

      --
      The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
  4. Hmm... by AntiOrganic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does it have menu shadows, though?

  5. Ouch... by inode_buddha · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    C|N>K
  6. hmm by nomadic · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  7. Yay! by not-quite-rite · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now all my pr0n can be

    asciipr0n!!!!

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

    1. Re:Yay! by nick+this · · Score: 2, Informative

      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. :)

    2. Re:Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

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

      69 699.

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

  8. What's next on a slow news day? by squashed · · Score: 3, Funny

    A new release of OS/2 ???

  9. Mirrors by brejc8 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    --
    Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
  10. Thats easy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    88 49 49

  11. ...In related news... by pr0f3550r · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  12. aaarrghh by borgdows · · Score: 5, Funny

    my eyees!! my eyes!!!!

    My eyes are ASCII-allergic you insensitive clod!

    1. Re:aaarrghh by damien_kane · · Score: 2, Funny

      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?

  13. Already /.'d, here's google's cache. by 2MuchC0ffeeMan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 .... I'm Still Alive
  14. /.ed Already by ciroknight · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...)

    --
    "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  15. /.ed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:/.ed by Dave9876 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  16. RTFA by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:RTFA by damien_kane · · Score: 2

      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>

  17. /.ed - here is a mirror of the startup image by Sabalon · · Score: 5, Funny

    X

  18. slashdotted? by Blob+Pet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."
    1. Re:slashdotted? by catmaker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      --
      status is failure. status is failure
    2. Re:slashdotted? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      No one EXPECTS a Slashdotting!!

    3. Re:slashdotted? by catmaker · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      status is failure. status is failure
  19. Re:cool but banal by leshert · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  20. ascii dvd-player (mplayer) by Carl+Drougge · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:ascii dvd-player (mplayer) by catmaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

      --
      status is failure. status is failure
    2. Re:ascii dvd-player (mplayer) by catmaker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

      --
      status is failure. status is failure
  21. This is why micro kernel and os is cool by Felinoid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  22. Games to Play in X11 ASCII by citizenc · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  23. A little premature... by twoslice · · Score: 2, Funny

    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...
  24. PC Anywhere and Windows 3.0... by PinchDuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!

  25. Slashdotted! by wo1verin3 · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  26. X11 Forwarding Is For Weenies by Effugas · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

  27. so by shaklee · · Score: 2, Funny

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

  28. Re:AALib by damiam · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes, it uses aalib and XGGI.

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  29. this is great by Blob+Pet · · Score: 3, Funny

    It should work well with the ATI Radeon 9500 ASC!

    --
    "...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
  30. NOBODY expects a Slashdotting! by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  31. Screw that, I'll make my own shots. by SmittyTheBold · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    Small section
    Full screen

    --
    ± 29 dB