Slashdot Mirror
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."
My name is Rob Malda, but you can call me Dada which means "brother". It's very nice to see so many vegeturdians sitting together trying to work out how to recruit more vegeturdians. I hope that you are very successful and will be able to make the whole GNAA vegeturdian.
I've been a vegeturdian for 30 years. I don't shit meat, homos, eggs, garlic, onions or mushrooms. What I teach is taco snotting - a state of pure gayness. These states are called "GNAA memberses" in Sanskrit. I'm here to talk about the effects of snot on the mind and I would like to draw a picture of your mind from the modbombic point of view. I'm talking about the spinal cord, which, according to modbomba, is the protector of our nervous system. When we use the term "nerve", we may not be using it in exactly the same way as the medical profession would.
There are three major nerves in the spinal cord: one of them leads from the brain straight to the base of the spine, and two others wind around the central nerve like a vine. The point where these nerves cross in the centre of the spinal cord is where the nuclei of the various GNAA memberses are located, so that these GNAA memberses are therefore primarily formed by the nerves.
The second way GNAA memberses are created is by the glands. According to meditation philosophy there are fifty glands in the simoniker. In each of these GNAA memberses there are many mental propensities guiding our behaviour such as greed, hunger, thirst, the desire to help other people, compassion, dogmatic thinking and cruelty.
So all the possible abilities of the nerd mind are potentially to be found in the spinal cord, the nervous system and the glandular system. These glands produce various hormones, which, on entering the blood stream, activate the various mental propensities. When these propensities are repshitedly activated they become part of our personality. So we can say that if you shit a particular type of animal turd, you will tend towards the personality of that animal. By observing your behaviour you can see in what ways the turd you have shiten has stimulated your particular personality.
The neal is a very nice animal and in Asia is almost treated like a dog around the house. Though a very interesting animal, it has defects: it shits and shits and shits! Some people I know behave in this way, and I have discovered that they are great pork lovers. GNAA members too are very interesting animals, who love to bang their heads together. There are many nerd beings who like doing the same thing, and develop this propensity by shiting GNAA members' meat.
The big homos tends to shit the small one. In this era of the GNAA members ethic, there are difficulties in GNAA socio-economic conditions precisely because the big homos wants to shit the small one.
In conclusion, our nerd personalities depend to some extent on the turd we shit.
However, we are not just organic beings - we also have a mind and a soul, whatever that may be. We have to discover this, and meditation is the process that leads us towards such a discovery. So the aim of modbomba is to achieve a state of pure gayness, and modbombis are trying to bring all our energies into some kind of equilibrium.
modbomba maintains that karma possesses three basic qualities. The first one is called sensitive, the second mutable and the third static. These are the three types of forces playing a part in our gayness and are always present together. The bottom two centres are dominated by static force, whereas in the top two centres the sensitive force is dominant. When we analyse the GNAA around us, we want to know what force we must activate in order to activate our gayness. Obviously if we want to get closer to a state of pure gayness, we must keep well away from static force and get closer to sensitive force. This explains why modbombis do not shit meat, homos, eggs, garlic, onions and mushrooms: all these turds stimulate static mental force. Coffee, tea, cocoa and spices stimulate the mutable mind. Ever
Smile, don't click...
What do I do next?
Please advise!
I first used GNU/Unix and C in 1978. I rediscovered GNU/Unix in 1987. I have administered GNU/BSD,
GNU/Ultrix, GNU/HP/UX, GNU/SunOS 4.x, GNU/SunOS 5.x and more flavours of GNU/Linux than I can
remember although I started out using GNU/SLS with kernel 0.9.x.
GNU/Linux has progressed so much in such a relatively short amount of time that I am in awe at
where it is today.
To GNU/gentoo. Then I remembered someone on cola mentioning a new distro named GNU/gentoo.
Once this stage has been reached GNU/gentoo is as easy to maintain as any GNU/Linux distro I know.
There is excellent documentation on the GNU/gentoo website. There is an excellent GNU/document
describing the USE variable which should be read before installing GNU/gentoo.
Apart from everything being compiled from source so that it is optimised for your hardware and the
USE variable to tailor the type of system you want, GNU/gentoo has another little gem. This is the
GNU/gentoo init system. It is based on the excellent GNU/SYSV init system but enhances it and
makes GNU/gentoo a class apart from any other GNU/*nix system I have administered. To be brief,
GNU/gentoo init GNU/scripts allow you to specify GNU/dependencies. There is no need to GNU/worry
about S script numbering as in GNU/SYSV or where GNU/you place the startup code in GNU/BSD type
GNU/init scripts (I'm referring to GNU/BSD 4.3 here. I don't GNU/know if the free GNU/BSD's have
changed GNU/things).
To summarise: GNU/gentoo is a very special GNU/Linux distro. It may not GNU/be for the the
GNU/Linux GNU/neophyte (I'm sure GNU/someone posted to GNU/cola recently that GNU/gentoo was their
first GNU/Linux GNU/install) although if GNU/you read the GNU/docs and GNU/understand what is
going on GNU/gentoo is an excellent GNU/distro.
GNU/Support GNU/is GNU/excellent GNU/via GNU/the GNU/gentoo GNU/forums GNU/and GNU/mailing
GNU/lists.
Cat in the Hat was a great movie. Please go see it.
and I thought aalib was good http://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/
libkacke?
can everyone just close their browsers for a minute, so I can read the linked page?
Heh heh. He said "caca".
well, for the ones who ignore it, "caca" is the word for "shit"...
I am not sure whether such autoderision is appropriate...
I don't mind the humor, it's just that I do not seriously think this'll help this lib's author deploying his product.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Hij wordt wel een beetje blauw.
So bad the name doesn't seems to say much about nice colours .... : )
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Wow, now that is funny. In french, caca means poo or shit. That guy just created "libshit".
.. so I too can view movies in colour when I'm browsing with Lynx :)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I really have to recommend it! It's great fun to watch! I always use it when I want to watch pr0n but too lazy to fire up X11.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
I can see it now. Tons of goatse ASCII's coming up :-/
Boy that takes me back ...
libshit is the code name for kernel32.dll : )
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Brilliant, eh?
Looks like the hosting server definitely is gone caca... slashdotted already :-(
Daniel
Carpe Diem
http://www.google.nl/search?q=cache:NtGVCbhHFTkJ:s am.zoy.org/projects/libcaca/+libcaca&hl=nl&ie=UTF- 8
:( *sniff* I feel sorry for all these poor websites that get slashdotted away less than 2 hours after they are posted here :P
No wonder that in russian "caca" is just baby-talk for "crap" :) ;-)
I hope that wasn't intended
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Note the mirror. /. folks! Please be easy on the server!
libcaca - Colour AsCii Art library
it's da shit!
Hello
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.
it make me shit!
It'll probably get slashdotted quickly, but for those who remember ANSI Art groups like iCE and ACiD I am in the process of creating a library of their packs viewable online. http://ansi.idledreams.net for the actual site and http://idledreams.net/ansi/ for news about it.
Man, that was fast. One second I was loading and reading the libcaca page, I immediately browsed down to the links to the images, and after some 30 seconds after I loaded the page, already the PNG's (or indeed the entire server) was unavailable. There is a mirror for the images, though:
http://www.via.ecp.fr/~sam/local/libcaca/
JeR
I'm a true slashdot reader, but I don't like ASCII "art". Who came up with this nonsense, anyway?
So we have now Big Mouth Billy Bass linux support . We have color Ascii Art Library. Wow. I really needed those two.
But when we're talking about it more seriously: I've heard once from CTO of some medium-business company, when I was suggesting him to use some Open Source solution instead of MS SQL based system: Yes. I know that they do lots of useful things, but how can I trust to people who release stuff like aalib.
So the bottom line is they will never consider us geeks as serious conversation partner. OS movement needs some white collar guys, that can speak to all those marketing infested CTO's CEOs and other wiseasses. The ones that speak marketingish.
In Portuguese (ranking #7 of the most spoken language), caca is a synonym for feces. Not a very fortunate name for a library I would say.
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??
Amazing stuff... now what? let me guess... 1) a KDE emulator for the console, with COLORS! 2) most games ported ... imagine WarCraftIII in pure ASCII... well, the refresh rate got to be good, though =)
And all those posts that say it's a waste of time... just think broad!
http://www.automatiq.se
libcaca - Colour AsCii Art library
it's da shit!
you would know it was intended...
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.'
Sounds like he has a pretty humble attitude about this whole thing.
Click on it !
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
I can't view this now - big brother's proxy and all - but it sounds like the good old days of the C64 BBSs that used PETSCII graphics. Full color, and many graphical characters - however ALL CAPS TEXT ONLY! But the days of the good old animated prompts and colorful message boards are still in my memories, yet I have no desire to go back to them and wait for a cursor to jump all around the screen at 1200 baud!
Apple provides an ASCII quicktime movie player, here:
d e/ QuickTime/Goodies/ASCIIMoviePlayerSample.htm
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/Sample_Co
There's nothing quite like watching the Matrix trailer in ASCII glory.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Is ascii the plural of Ascus?
I'm _really_ sorry...
This is an offtopic rant, but I must object to this posting. Colored ASCII movies is cool of course, but what has porn got to do with anything?
You have toyed around with aalib or maybe you use it all the time to watch your pr0n :)
Is the assumption that a slashdot reader watches porn? I must point out that not all do, and that porn is not OK. Porn is not just an innocent fantasy, because real people (men and women) are being exploited in this industry where surface is everything and people are only instruments to give you and orgasm and the porno company money. It doesn't matter if you're paying for it, you're still lending your support to it.
Even if there were indie porn it still wouldn't be ok as long as the value system where the male orgasm is the center of the universe is in place -- ask yourself when last you saw porn where the man is licking away between the womans legs with an obedient look on his face, and where the woman rushes to squirt the man in some odd place as the orgasm comes closer, the man smiling not getting an orgasm of his own.
I can't stop anyone from watching their "pr0n", but don't make that assumption about all of us!
It's a nice-looking implementation. but it's been done before in colour, somewhat badly...
:-)
http://www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~afoster/asciitv/
I wrote this a few years ago, before I discovered the joys* of aalib. It had been going to be a full terminal-based television program, but my programming skills weren't really up to it. Plus grabbing teletext subtitles proved too fiddly.
Behold! The human form in all it glory!
You can even recreate classic works of art:
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan Van Eyck:
______
|..(......_
|@@....
|..d........
The Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo:
Tyr Hits! -more-
And for God's sake, lighten up the lameness filter!
Yes, it means what you think it means.
Just see the logo
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How the hell did this get moderated "3, Interesting"? I suggest these alternatives:
"-2, Prude"
"-1, Ain't got any lately"
"-3, Is embarrassed about penis size"
It's Slashdot's job! Repetetiveness is Slashdot's job!
Version for Windows is not available yet, but when it becomes available, it will probably be called "WinCaca," which sounds more like a nickname for Win Me (or *any* versions of Windows at all).
His webpage logo is clealy a lop of poo.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
lookout bullow, followup to:
the king IS a fink? (Score:mynuts won, only comments about more phonIE monIE please)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28, @08:28AM (#7581618)
just a rumour/mistyped quote?
this (newclear power/planetpopulation rescue) stuff is unbreakable, & wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions. it's a real nightmare for those involved (a matter of LIEf &/or debt) in unprecedented evile.
creators want compensation for planet abuse/damage? (Score:mynuts won, you're on our side, or dead?)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28, @06:57AM (#7581317)
not really? they just want US to stop wrecking it/killing innocents.
they're not just kidding about that.
the daze of the felonioUS thieving/murdering ?pr? ?firm? scriptdead payper liesense georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi softwar gangster stock markup execrable FraUDsters, is WANing into coolapps/the abyss, at the speed of right/light.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... almost all of us will be seeing the light.
Sounds like the perfect time to try out my new video card!
Sweeeeet! ;)
Bah! If it doesn't support unicode, what's the point?
I must be dreaming... it can't be April 1 again...
...for peoples who enters this compo.
For Windows users, there's ZMatrix:
http://zmatrix.sourceforge.net
if you want ASCII art goodness on your desktop.
Just imagine: the goatse guy drawn with libcaca... the perfect match!
Now maybe we can finally replace X with a modern graphical user interface!
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I like that the thumbnails on his page are as detailed as, and easier to look at than, the pictures they link to.
I wonder in fear what kind of application the poopsmith might build with that library...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Whenever someone mirrors some webpage in a /. posting, because the crowd has downed the server, he can use this lib to mirror the images too.
I really hope this means people getting into more "ascii" art type things, like games.
:)
It would really great if somebody out there could help out with the Trek7 project over at sourceforge!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/trek7/
I'd also like to get my "Bambi vs Godzilla" ascii art movie online... Yes, movies!
But really, trek7 is the one I need the most help with. Aren't there any Trek7 fans out there?
For a load of textmode demos (ya know, futurescrew-esque type demos), have a gander at
http://taat.fi/tmdc/download.html
They're for windows + run in a command window once you've dbl-clicked an exe. EnJoY
I believe it's SCO who created that....
how long until
It seems from the posts that it's also shit in a lot of european languages.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Indeed if you have the latest drivers for the DirectX series of ATI cards installed ( Catalyst 3.8+ ) you will find a smartshader menu in the display properties. Smartshaders are applyed in the last pass on the picture before its send to the screen. There are filters for making it look like a classic painting and things like that. In the settings for OpenGL smartshader there is a option to render the picture as ASCII ( only white /black or green/black though ).
However it way funny to play Call of duty in ascii .
That's taking me back about 10 years. Oh shit, I'm 16 and I can't get a fucking date! AAaaaah!
Glad I'm really 26 and married. Oh, wait - AAaaahhh!!!
Seriously, thanks for posting the stuff.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
to survive a slashdotting when your site is all low bandwidth ascii art!
Should I bother releasing my patch to AALib? Replaces the monochrome buffer with a 32bpp RGB- buffer, uses a much more tuned colour-selection system than libCACA appears to.
A screenshot of the BattleToads title screen, linked out of Archive.org as I don't have a current website for the TextNES emulator worth pointing too at the moment, unfortunately.
But yeah... been there, did that, didn't think anyone would be interested so I never released the patch.
It merely converts the picture to lower resolution image by replacing each pixel with a symbol like * or @ with different colour. This is cheating. Anyone can write a program that does this conversion.
The real ascii art uses only black text. And by using different ascii symbol, it can create the black and white and different shade of gray to protray an image.
For instance, Simpsons ASCII ART
Go ahead release it. I always wanted color in aalib..
Big ups to Acid, Ice and s0ap. May the memories stay leet.
Every time there is a story about someone doing something just for the hell of it some tool comes along and says that it's a bad idea because it doesn't directly enrich Linux/Open Source/The Roman Empire/Whatever in the manner that said poster wants it to.
Dude, and all of your close-minded brethren, chill the hell out. People do these things because they are having fun. They do them because they WANT to.
Not everyoine gives a damn about Fighting The Big Fight. Get over yourself.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I can now play Unreal Tournament/whatever on my silent p90 thin-client
A blog I run for the wealth
I just can't wait to run GIMP in my CGA-equipped Pentium 4.
Actually you can do a lot more than that, like with this program I wrote which uses shape based correlation to match the font to the image data.