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Star Wars, in stunning ASCII-mation

Posted by Hemos on from the mommy-i'm-scared dept.

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.

8 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. The applet that JAVA was invented for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    This HAS to be the coolest piece of JAVA
    ever written.

  2. Java under netscape in stock Redhat 6 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    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

  3. Linux terminal viewer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

    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..

    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/sw play.jar

    - 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 ) ;
    }



    1. Re:Linux terminal viewer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4

      ASCII and java don't mix ;-)

      wget http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lucas/339/swpl ay.jar
      unzip -j swplay.jar data/sw1.txt
      perl -pe 'if(/^(\d+)\s*$/){select undef,undef,undef,$1/15;$_="\e[H\e[J"}' sw1.txt

  4. Fixing Java in Netscape on RH 6.0 by pridkett · · Score: 4
    Okay, seeing as people were complaining about this, here is how you fix it. True you can install a bunch of RPMs that you probably don't need, or you can look at this page in RedHat's knowledge base.

    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...
  5. Perl/Curses viewer by superfly · · Score: 5

    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.

  6. Scary by SGC · · Score: 4

    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.

  7. This should be a collaberative effort by Johnboy · · Score: 5

    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.