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Star Wars, in stunning ASCII-mation
id_entity writes "For those of us not lucky enough to see the
Phantom Menace this weekend, view the first
Star Wars in ASCII-mation.
It was created
by Simon Jansen, a talented man with lots of time on
his hands, and includes almost 10,000 ASCII
frames of animation. " Someone needs a new hobby. I mean it.
Has anyone tried if the open-jni that was just added to mozilla works? it'd be nice to load that thing in kaffe....
at least someone else out there watches Red Dwarf. (Which is the pentultimate science fiction show. damn star wars. :P )
EOM
This is one of the most amazing things that
I have ever seen! I was awed by the fanaticism
which must have went into creating it. Some
might find it sad that this fellow put soo much
effort into such an endevour but I think that
its good. Nobody got hurt, he must have enjoyed
himself and I think a lot of people will get
some enjoyment out of his work. I know my
sons and I did. BTW I couldn't view it in
Netscape but the JDK Appletviewer and HotJava 3.0 (which does work under Linux) both display it nicely.
The person that created this has WAY too much time on his hands.
iCab uses the Apple MRJ for java, and had no problem showing the film, other than the minor jumpiness somebody was mentioning. No workaround necessary :)
Easternmost it may be, by some definition ... but the international date line keeps all of Alaska on this side, so it ends up being the westernmost (for time purposes).
can this get any funnier?
Yes.
"This is the coolest thing I have ever seen..."
Does anybody know if this man has a job?
If he has I would like to get the same...
"I am very sorry to inform people that due to other commitments I have had to remove my Star Wars Asciimation site."
???
-Tom
This is probably something laying around from the old bbs days. I remember all sorts of ANSI animated garbage and such on the BBSes. He has probably had this sitting around on his hard drive for 10 years or so waiting for its day...
We all know that that Alaska is easternmost state in the union and I guess if there were any theaters out there they could have shown the movie almost a day earlier.
"Applet SwPlay can't start: class SwPlay got a security violation: method verification error". Awesome. ;)
(For the Java whizzes out there: Nutscrape Canonicator 4.5 on MacOS 8.5. Diagnose this!)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Help!
I love the Princess's hair. And Luke's eyes
after he gets wacked by the sand people.
hehe.. great, but how can you exit once it starts playing?
A program is a device used to convert data into error messages.
Posted by O-:
It does say alot for the man's dedication...that or he has a never ending supply of beer, and does this from a lap top sitting on the can all day...
see sja-play.el for an elisp player. i call it "sja" for "simon jansen asciimation". this file is part of project ADHOC, under GNU GPL.
This HAS to be the coolest piece of JAVA
ever written.
Someone DOES need a new hobby, but that does require some talent.
for supreme waste of bandwidh. :)
'way too much time on his hands'
This guy is my hero too, WOW is right!!!
My friends use that expression for everything I do that is not invovled with drinking and watching sports on TV. I try to be understanding of THEM...but here on Slashdot it really bugs me!
Filter...
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
You've gone and posted something that will make me pull out my SW tapes and watch them again. Geez! And I was just getting over that!
This version causes the delay for each frame to be set correctly. This will help any of you that were having problems with the text just flashing by during certain scenes:
perl -pe 'if(/^(\d+)\s*$/){select undef,undef,undef,$old/15;$old=$1;$_="\e[H\e[J"}' sw1.txt
(Note: this version isn't completely correct either. It assumes a value of 0 for the first frame, but in this case it doesn't matter since that frame is blank.)
---
Yes. It would be nice if Rob or Hemos could add the ability to do
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!
yea, you want to do it?
No man is an island, But if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie them together, they make a pretty good raft.
the next thing that it needs is to play the theme music using the system bell.
Posted by Art Pepper:
Navigator 4.5, Debian 2.1
10,000 frames! Must be nice to not have to work.
I dunno about all of those, but as for the sistine chapel -- his jailers : )
Ascii? Bah... Check out the FIGURES WARS
http://members.xoom.com/sqrpshr/
OK OK.. That ascii has the whole movie and IS cool. Hell I can watch it at work.
Where does this person get all his time from? I mean, I hardly have the time to watch The Simpsons every day! Anyway, it's a really nice idea. We're lucky it wasn't mine since then it would never get added to...
This guy has a future ahead of him at ILM or Digital Domain!
The FX BLOWS away the Phantom Menace!
I'm still shaking....can't wait to see the ASCII version of Empire now!
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
check out his link page to evan's star wars cinema. its at http://www.jedinet.com/cinema . Watch the realaudio movies. Its made on a mac with star wars actions figures and a great soundtrack. I was very impressed.
What would drive a man to do this?
What would drive a man to create his own os?
What would drive a man to paint the sistine chapel ceiling?
What would drive a man to cross the atlantic in a single seater airplane.
The world is a little better place because of people like him.
Keep up the good work.
this is just un-smegging-believable! this is PURE genius!
[slammer56]
I had the problem with netscape crashing. It seems you need to load *all* the font RPMs.
rpm -i XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-Type1-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i chkfontpath-1.4.1-1.i386.rpm
rpm -i ghostscript-fonts-5.10-3.noarch.rpm
[
hope this helps
Yeeesh. And I thought I was slick when I whipped up some ASCII for my pine .signature.
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Without doubt, this is the coolest piece of Perl the world has ever seen.
Yes, sure ... run some this through some that ... he'd fun for sure. It was the first time I switched on Java without regretting it. Cool stuff, no plastics.
We all know that that Alaska is easternmost state in the union
By latitude, maybe; by the international dateline and Alaskan politics, no.
and I guess if there were any theaters out there they could have shown the movie almost a day earlier.
I was born and raised in Nome, Alaska and we would have gotten the movie last (if we had a movie theater, that is). When I was a kid, the state legislature voted to put Alaska all on one time zone (GMT -9); it's been this way for at least a decade.
This World Time Zone Map shows it. in case you don't take my word for it.
Actually, looking at the map, we would have beaten out Hawaii (which is GMT -10).
Jay (=
I wonder how long movies we can NOW put on DVDs. =)
Although at least one other person is working on an alternate viewer for the movie, i just thought I'd add my $0.02 with this quick C hack. No fast forward support here, sorry..
;-).
w play.jar
Looks much cooler than in Netscape. And you can
have it full screen
- Copy the text below into a file, say "player.c"
- Then compile it with "gcc player.c -o player"
- Next download the jar archive containing the movie from:
http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lucas/339/s
- Unzip the jar archive with "unzip swplay.jar"
- Move the sw1.txt file from the data/ dir to the same place as the player
program you just compiled.
- Run "player", and enjoy.
-- copy the text below into player.c --
#include
#include
#include
#define BASIC_DELAY_TIME ( 1000000L / 15L )
#define LINES_PER_FRAME 13
int main ( void )
{
FILE * fd ;
int I , end = 0 ;
long delayTime ;
char delayTimeString [ 130 ] ;
char oneLine [ 130 ] ;
fd = fopen ( "sw1.txt" , "rt" ) ;
if ( fd == NULL ) {
printf ( "Error! Couldn't read sw1.txt\n" ) ;
return ;
}
while (( ! feof ( fd ) ) && ( ! end )) {
if ( fgets ( delayTimeString , 128 , fd ) != NULL ) {
delayTime = atol ( delayTimeString ) * BASIC_DELAY_TIME
;
if ( delayTime = 0 ) {
end = 1 ;
printf ( "Bad delay time error\n" ) ;
} else {
printf ( "\x1b[2J\n" ) ;
for ( I = 0 ; I if ( fgets ( oneLine , 128 , fd ) == NUL
L ) {
end = 1 ;
break ;
} else {
printf ( "%s" , oneLine ) ;
}
}
usleep ( delayTime ) ;
}
} else {
end = 1 ;
}
}
fclose ( fd ) ;
return ( 1 ) ;
}
Yes. It would be nice if Rob or Hemos could add the ability to do < and >
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!
Yeah, mine doesn't crash, but it doesn't work right.
I first saw this yesterday and viewed it in nav 4.5 running on my win 95 (ugh) desktop at work. It was pretty funny.
Then when I got home I tried to load it up to show it to my wife on nav 4.6 running under Linux. It didn't explode but it was all skewed and jumpy. Very dissapointing.
Netscape, get your act together, please.
Here is a summary, type the following as root:
/usr/sbin/chkfontpath --add /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
hope this helps. Thats a pretty cool java applet I gotta admit. Also for some of you who are having problems, it might be because of an old version of netscape (or IE I suppose) that doesn't yet support Java 1.1 applets. In that case you gotta waste some bandwidth downloading a newer version.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Yep, I'm sorry to say, but there were a number of bugs that were in the orignal code posted. Because I had nothing to do this morning before I went off to see starwars, I fixed it up and got it working. So, here it is, the new and improved version: (same install instructions as noted above)
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#define BASIC_DELAY_TIME ( 1000000 / 15 )
#define LINES_PER_FRAME 13
main(void)
{
FILE * fd ;
int I , end = 0 ;
long delayTime ;
char delayTimeString[128] ;
char oneLine[128] ;
fd = fopen ( "sw1.txt" , "rt" ) ;
if ( fd == NULL ) {
printf ( "Error! Couldn't read sw1.txt\n" ) ;
return ;
}
while ((! feof(fd)) && (end != 1)) {
if ( fgets ( delayTimeString , 120 , fd ) != NULL ) {
delayTime = atol ( delayTimeString ) * BASIC_DELAY_TIME ;
if ( delayTime == 0 ) {
end = 1 ;
printf ( "Bad delay time error\n" ) ;
}
else {
printf ( "\x1b[2J\n" ) ;
for ( I = 0 ; I LINES_PER_FRAME ; I ++ ) {
if ( fgets ( oneLine , 120 , fd ) == NULL ) {
end = 1 ;
break ;
}
else {
printf ( "%s" , oneLine ) ;
}
}
usleep ( delayTime ) ;
}
} else {
end = 1 ;
}
}
fclose ( fd ) ;
return ( 1 ) ;
}
/*EOF*/
If the < and > tags didn't work above, replace them with lessthan (<) and greaterthan (>) signs (the angle brackets...)
Jeff
Ooooh a -1, remind me to redefine the Slashdot Quotient to account for that.
BOFH mode continues to be on.
Slash-help mailing list, Scary Devil Monastery for recovery after installing Slash. Remind me to put in the FAQ on how to turn moderation OFF too. Darn hypocrits.
I'm working on an alternative viewer using Perl and Curses. Right now it supports pausing and multiple forward speeds (even though they aren't accurate). I plan to add reverse play once I fix the speed control.
I don't know what scared me more. The fact that someone actually had the time and energy to create that, or the fact that I actually sat and watched the whole thing. I might make popcorn and watch it again.
c.
Now someone needs to go fix the old BBS game Tradewars to have this as one of the options at the Stardock Cinemas!
Well, what about the great days when one was able to view an ASCII movie just by using his/her terminal emulation?
I want to see it, too, but am not able to use Java. (Please don't say "Netscape" now)
.sig: SEGV
I'm speechless.....
Mine does. It's called Netscape Communicator 4.07. And I'd rather not be able to see the asciimation, than have to reboot again my machine 5 times a day, thank you.
I wrote a curses viewer which supports multiple playback speeds, pausing, and compression (that 930k movie file gzips into a nice little 37k bundle) Go grab it from http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~askalski/swplay.html and enjoy :-)
That would probably be highly illegal, just like distibuting an mpeg would be.
Plus, I really enjoyed this one, especially after seeing Phantom Menace for the second time this morning. I just had to hear the sound difference between the two theatres. Big difference, the place I saw it first (nerd showing, 12:01AM, first regular showing in North America, because I'm as east as possible in Newfoundland, hahaha) had a way better sound system.
Well for those of you who can't live without knowing how all this works...
I used some of my infinite skills to open up the jar file that all this is stored in and to my amazement he put the source in there! SwPlay.java is the applet source and /data/sw1.txt is the animation text. Have fun! .jar file is compressed like a .zip file so you can use unzip to extract everything.
note: For those of you who don't know a
Intosi
Intosi
I read the FAQ. He doesn't want to Open Source it until he's finished. He's been working on it since July 1997! If enough people show interest and convince him to let us, does anybody want to form a "human render farm" and get this thing done sooner than 2036?
-- Liquor up front, poker in the rear.
But, what would drive a man to do this? I mean, it is quite clearly insane! But then, what would I know - I keep coding c64's and speccy's :) :) art would be cool enuf.
As an aside tho, what would be even cooler would be taking an MPG of The Phantom Menace (or A New Hope), and running it through a color equvalet AAlib (does aalib have a color mode yet?), and saving that. Of course, you would need sound as well, but hell, even just color ascii (or ansi... bbs's rule
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
It's brilliant and beautiful. I can't imagine the dedication this guy must have. I'm waiting for Empire... :-)