Retronetworking » BBS-Revival

h1. ANSI Artwork

ANSI artwork is a kind of low-resolution graphics that is created using the ANSI character set and its related color capabilities.  It is typically made for the traditional 80 columns x 24 rows character mode display available on PC graphics cards. (24 rows as the 25th bottom row was usually occupied by the status line of the [[Terminal_Program]].

ANSI artwork can exceed far beyond its ancestor of ASCII artwork.

See also 

* "wikipedia on ANSI art":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art

* "An Abbreviated History of the Underground Computer Art Scene":http://cd.textfiles.com/darkdomain/www/html/history-art_scene.html

* "16colo.rs - Collection of ANSI art work":https://16colo.rs/

h2. Editors

ANSI artwork can be created entirely by hand in a text editor, but it is relatively cumbersome to do so.

Over time, dedicated software for the creation of ANSI art was established.

The most well-known software at the time is probably "TheDraw":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

TheDraw is long unmaintained/abandoned.

Today, there are open source alternatives such as

* "PabloDraw":https://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/ (.NET)

* "Moebius":https://github.com/blocktronics/moebius (node.js / Javascript)

and closed source programs like

* "REXPaint":https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ (win32 only, but good support via wine)

exist.

ANSI art logo makers can also be utilized to create simple banners:

* "WAB_Ansi_Logo_Maker":https://github.com/N0NameN0/WAB_Ansi_Logo_Maker (PHP) - "live demo":https://n0namen0.github.io/WAB_Ansi_Logo_Maker/