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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."
libkacke?
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.
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?
Agreed. Most commercial software firms will not develop with a library if it's name means shit. It's attitudes like this which work against ascii art libraries being taken seriously in the commercial world.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Brilliant, eh?
http://www.google.nl/search?q=cache:NtGVCbhHFTkJ:s am.zoy.org/projects/libcaca/+libcaca&hl=nl&ie=UTF- 8
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.
I think he knows what it means. Check out the homepage, particularly the graphic on the top right.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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??
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.
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!
"Wrong assumptions" may be right. I believe it was teletype operators who came up with character art long before computers were on the scene.
His webpage logo is clealy a lop of poo.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Sounds like the perfect time to try out my new video card!
Sweeeeet! ;)
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.
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
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
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