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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.
"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.
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...
This HAS to be the coolest piece of JAVA
ever written.
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.)
---
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.
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
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 ) ;
}
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...
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.
Intosi
Intosi
I disagree. I think he needs a new development platform, but this is art. Obviously a huge undertaking and the result is fascinating. Knowing how much time was spent creating it only makes it better. It reminds me of those strange things people build, like the glass house somewhere in Canada.
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!