Color Ascii Art Library

thedj_sd writes "As the true slashdot reader you just love ascii art of course. You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :) Well VLC media player's senior developer sam was bored some time ago and created libcaca. The Colour AsCii Art library of which he himself says: 'I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.' But you just can't help looking at that beautiful picture of Stitch, and Doom in coloured ascii is da bomb. It works on dos/windows, Linux and Mac OS X and there is a VLC plugin and SDL backend available."

Comments

Google cache link

[thedj_sd]

http://www.google.nl/search?q=cache:NtGVCbhHFTkJ:s am.zoy.org/projects/libcaca/+libcaca&hl=nl&ie=UTF- 8

Re:Google cache link

[l0wland]

I love to click on a link :-)

Mirror, front page text

[rusty_razor]

Note the mirror.
libcaca - Colour AsCii Art library
it's da shit!
Hello /. folks! Please be easy on the server!
Images and tarball are mirrored at http://www.via.ecp.fr/~sam/local/libcaca/.
The libcaca library is a graphics library that outputs text instead of pixels, so that it can work on older video cards or text terminals. It is not unlike the famous AAlib library. libcaca needs a terminal to work, thus it should work on all Unix systems (including Mac OS X) using either the slang library or the ncurses library, on DOS using the library, and on Windows systems using either slang or ncurses (through Cygwin emulation) or .
Libcaca is free software, and can be used, modified and ditributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Publice License. The logo on this page is copyrighted by Akira Toriyama so if anyone fancies drawing a new logo it would be much appreciated. Features

The differences with AAlib are the following:
* 16 available colours for character output
* dithering of colour images
* basic sprite primitives

But libcaca also has the following limitations:
* no support for brightness, contrast, gamma
* unefficient character-choosing algorithms
* no alternate fonts
* no raw keyboard support
* mouse support only works for slang
* no custom drivers a la AA-on-X

I am perfectly aware that libcaca is the waste of time it looks to be. No need to tell me about that.
Screenshots

Here are my first libcaca attempts. On the left, my test application, an image viewer. On the right, my first port of an application so that it uses libcaca: the VLC media player.
As with all image processing applications, I needed the obligatory Lenna samples. From left to right: no dithering, ordered dithering, random dithering.
no dithering ordered dithering random dithering
Here are a few examples of my libcaca patch for libSDL. Once there is a libcaca backend for libSDL, any program using SDL can automatically benefit from libcaca's rendering routines. These examples show Frozen Bubble, the SABRE flight simulator, and the famous Doom. Frozen Bubble is fully playable, but SABRE and Doom aren't much due to the Ctrl and Shift keys not being recognized (see the TODO list about that).
Frozen Bubble SABRE Doom splash screen first Doom level Download libcaca
Latest libcaca release is libcaca-0.1.tar.gz. See the NEWS and ChangeLog files.
Until libcaca enters Debian, woody and sid users may use one of the following apt sources: (sorry, sarge is not supported yet)

deb http://sam.zoy.org/projects/debian woody main
deb-src http://sam.zoy.org/projects/debian woody main

deb http://sam.zoy.org/projects/debian sid main
deb-src http://sam.zoy.org/projects/debian sid main

Patch for libSDL
This simple patch was quickly hacked from the AAlib video driver. Apply it to the libSDL sources and configuree libSDL with --enable-video-caca. Then use the SDL_VIDEODRIVER environment variable to run your SDL programs with libcaca output, for instance Frozen Bubble:
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=caca frozen-bubble

Download patch-libsdl1.2-libcaca0.1.diff. Patch for VLC The libcaca patch for the VLC media player was already applied upstream. Check the CVS version. Development The mailing-list for libcaca users and developers is libcaca@lists.zoy.org. To subscribe, send an email to ecartis@lists.zoy.org containing the words "subscribe libcaca". To unsubscribe, just use "unsubscribe libcaca". Please report bugs and make suggestions to libcaca@lists.zoy.org. There is no public access to the SVN repository yet, but you can browse it using the web interface, for instance to have a look at the BUGS and TODO lists.

More ASCII Art

[MouseR]

For those interested, here's Text mode Quake and AsciiMac, wich seem to predate the previous one, including the X11 ASCII art thing.

What is it with ASCII??

Of course you could always just use quicktime

[b-baggins]

Apple provides an ASCII quicktime movie player, here:

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Cod e/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.htm

There's nothing quite like watching the Matrix trailer in ASCII glory.

Re:Of course you could always just use quicktime

[ichandarin]

Oops. You got the address wrong!

Here are the correct links:
-The program itself + source are at:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample/qtplyr.c. htm

-And the sample video:
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Code/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.htm

Hope those links help.

Re:ANSI Art Library

[WiKKeSH]

While you're at it, you can check individual group's sites.

http://www.senseimagery.com
http://www.acid.org
http://www.ice.org
http://www.spreadthedisease. com
http://www.spreadthedisease.com/27inch

Re:ANSI Art Library

[lordscarlet]

And don't forget ASCII sites

http://www.mimic.ca

OK. I'm lame and only know one ASCII group site. :)

Re:Wrong assumptions

[MxTxL]

Back in the stone age, you know, before 1990, when modem speed was measured in baud and 300 of them was pretty good, people used to connect to BBSes as their primitive form of an internet. These were sort of stand-alone websites that you had to dial into directly (yes, over real phone lines). Since 300 baud modems transmit data at dismally slow speeds (and besides computer graphics displays were still primitive) it was necessary to provide any graphics content in a format that was easily and quickly transmitted and supported by the hardware. And by hardware, we're talking about Commodores and Amigas and early IBM PCs.

Today, it's primitive and low-res but Back In The Day(tm), this type of art was the shiz-nit. Art packs (ok, these were mostly ANSI, not ASCII but similar vein) were traded across the country from BBS to BBS.

If you've never tried to draw anything with giant multicolored blocks, you can't understand the talent that goes into this art medium. The ACiD guys were REALLY good.

Re:libCACA?

[BigJim.fr]

> Wow, now that is funny. In french, caca means poo
> or shit. That guy just created "libshit".

Actually Sam is French, so the humor is completely voluntary.

Re:I've been waiting for this for ages

[Illserve]

Not unless it's heavily motion compressed.

40 x 80 characters x 30 frames per second is 96,000 bytes per second.

And that's not including color information either, which is 4 bits per character, adding another 48K Bytes/sec.