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."
.. so I too can view movies in colour when I'm browsing with Lynx :)
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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?
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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