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ASCII World Cup
Richard writes to tell us that the web is bringing you the next step up from watching those world cup matches in high-def. As the self-proclaimed "best, most ridiculous, most redundant graphical implementation of ASCII", ascii-wm.net brings you the 2006 World Cup live via your telnet window.
Good luck connecting to it.
I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.
Whats needed is a replay of a previous match.
You know it strikes me that probably 90% of the Internet audience these days would have no clue what ASCII is, much less how to telnet into the server.
On one hand, that's slightly sad - I remember being able to type faster on a C-64 than the modem could transmit - on the other it's amazing how far technology has come in only a decade.
My other thought is to ask the likelihood that FIFA will shut them down as an infringing activity.
Three Squirrels
I guess I'll just keep playing Text Mode First Person Shooters while I wait
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.
This is Slashdot. Surely somebody here can whip up a network of mirrors in time for tomorrow's game...
("netcat ascii-wm.net 2006 | netcat -u 224.0.0.1 5555" to bridge it to a local multicast stream, an inetd-launched daemon to handle client connections, round-robin DNS for load balancing, etc.)
This is an incredibly easy way to do it:
Select a mono-space font, like Courier. This makes things infinitely easier.
Figure out the size of a character in pixels, in the font size you're going to render at.
The next thing you do is to make an array of every single ASCII character that you want to use, and order it based on intensity of the characters in the font you're going to render in. (Start with space, period, little-o, capital-X, to make things easy for yourself.)
Figure out your display area, say 1280x1024.
Figure out your display area in characters (divide your display area by your character size), this is your ACTUAL resolution.
You might want to make a 2D-array of characters to store an intermediate version of your output image in textual form, at that ACTUAL resolution (probably something like 80x80, or so.)
Produce a greyscale image, with window/level, pan, zoom, etc. at your ACTUAL resolution. Subsampling works, but resampling works better. Doesn't really matter if you do 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. You might as well do everything unsigned, since you don't care about absolute values (like negatives), just the relative intensities.
Map the intensities onto your ASCII table. In my trivial example (four possible output characters), you'd shift everything right 6 bits for 8-bit input, or 14 bits for 16-bit input. Do your table look-up. Either render that character immediately, or put it into an array of characters to be rendered later...
Pretty simple, no? It worked much better than I thought it would - especially if you allow the user to pan, zoom, window/level - that really "sells" the ASCII renderings. This isn't doing anything to try to match ASCII characters against the actual contours in your image, like the visual difference between | and - is ignored, but at a gross level, it works quite nicely.
Education is the silver bullet.
I tried it yesterday. When I first connected I had an ASCII plan view of a football pitch, so I was expecting an "O" to appear for the ball and move about during the game.
:-)
It wasn't that at all. It was the live picture converted to ASCII. It was impossible to see what was going on when it had a wide shot of the field (i.e. most of the time), but when it cut to a close up, you could quite easily make out the people moving around. You could also see the on-screen captions appear.
Totally useless, but brilliant in a geeky way
BTW, games start at 14:00, 17:00 and 20:00 BST (I'll let you convert that to your own time).