The ANSI Scene

Written by Cyberphreak

"There's an ansi scene?!", you must be asking. Well, yeah, there is, and it's been there for a while too.

I feel like bitching about the lack of respect ansi artists get. Ansi has to be one of the most difficult art mediums to master, why? Well,

1. Because there arn't any fancy colors to use. You have your 16 little colors and only being able to use the first 8 for the background.

2. You have a limited character set. Û Ü ß ÝÞ þ ° ± ², that's basically it, although you can use every other character, MOST ansis use only those 9.

3. All you got is 80 columns horizontally to draw in. Now that might sound like a reasonable amount of space, but when you look at the size of those 'blocks', and the few colours you got, it's a huge dick up your ass. Right, you might be thinking, "Hey hang on a minute! I've seen .bin's that have those same 'blocks' and colours in, but they can have more than 80 lines!" Yeah, you're right. But I'm talking about the original .ans, that's the format almost all the old ansi dogs have been saving their art in for just about ten years now. If you take a look at a few ansi packs, you'll notice about 98% of all the art is saved in .ans anyway. (Btw, you can have as 1000+ rows, only 80 columns.)

If ansi is so crippled, why do people even bother drawing ansi? That's sort of like asking, "Why bother making demos?" The reason why I draw ansi is because it gives me a sense of pride and satisfaction when I see just what I have 'created' using the limited tools at hand.

Ansi is not something you can master overnight, it takes experience, and a lot of it too! Those are some of the reasons I think the ansi scene needs more respect, and why it's, IMHO, the most difficult art medium to master.

If you're reading this, and wanna contribute/support the ansi scene, or just wanna take a look, and see "what's up", you can /join #ans (EFnet), notice, there's no 'i' in #ans, that's because it's the alternative ansi channel, started by Maestro of The Legion, for ansi artists, because of the shit that was going on in #ansi at the time.

Or you could check out ftp://cdrom.com/pub/artpacks/ (for packs/utils/mags), http://www.acheron.org (latest ansi news/pack releases)...

I'll leave you with a little quote from maestro's message to the ansi scene..

"do you understand that we have all helped in one way or another to keep this legacy alive? that's right.. a legacy. that's what we have created. a bunch of people, most of us teens, from all over the world have united with one common love.. ansi. a silly 16 color graphic that's probably not important to alot of people, but it's important to us. i don't want to see that legacy die. i don't want to see the excitement forgotten. it's time for a new era. it's time for a change." -- maestro.txt

// Cyberphreak (Kibosh ansi)