What about Ansi?
To avoid that you read something you are not interested in, please check first whether you really want to read this. If you are one of those future-oriented sceners who think every C64, Atari, Amiga and PC below Pentium should be destroyed and every demo should only run on PIIIs with 550 MHz and use all the new stuff, then better do not continue. If you are an oldskool freak or an average scener who likes all scene-related stuff, then you can go on.
Before I start now, I want to say that there might be some errors in here. I'm no ANSI-insider or scener, so please don't mail me some evil criticism if there are such errors.
Huh, now we can start. You probably already realized that I want to talk about ANSI/ASCII art here. (For more easy writing and reading I will use A/A for ANSI/ASCII.) And there's the question. Where's all that funky A/A stuff? Yes, please don't write me intelligent mails now that I should have a look at the file_id and nfo files of Hugi... But beside inside & outside Hugi I don't see many A/A stuff. Most groups seem to think, that this is not necessary anymore. While you could see nicely designed nfo & file_id files some time ago, today they mainly look like this:
Hello !
This is the info file of the XYZ group.
I'm a lazy writer so read all about us
at http://www.xyz.xx
Hmm, bye for now
XYZ/ZYX
I must say, that I really enjoy nfo-filez with A/A logos and texts, because they give the ZIP (or ARJ or whatever) release-file something special. I'm always excited when I unpack a ZIP and the first thing I do is to look at the file_id and nfo files. It's something like the first part of the demo I didn't run yet and it simply is cool. A/A pictures/logos show the real skills of a GFXer because you are very limited in size and colors. Usually you use 80x25 or 80x50 txt-modes and it's not easy to create something really good-looking... but when it looks good, it looks super-good. It looks even better than a "real" picture. I also think, that it's a good idea to use A/A pictures at the end of a demo just to have a nice ending. When I just think of the A/A picture at the end of Sonic PC's "Delusion".... wooooooow! Later demos?
This is the end of the demo.
It was terminated with error code: 0
Freeing memory now...
128Megs of memory freed...
Great. Really great. But as far as I see it, most people think that it's too old-fashioned. "Let's better use a 1024x768 picture rendered with 3DS instead." And also many parties tend to this opinion. Just some weeks ago I read on a party-page, that the A/A compo is striked out. Why? They didn't tell, but probably it was because they didn't have something so oooold to view it, and NOTEPAD.EXE doesn't show it correctly.
Another party: Assembly '99. Some months ago I mailed Abyss: "What about including an A/A compo in Assembly '99?" His answer: "Great idea! We'll think about it!!" As we all realized: They didn't inlcude it and I also think that they didn't think about it. Yes, that's too old-fashioned for a modern demoparty. It's far better to think about how to keep the ethernet running so that the kiddies can play Quake. But A/A? Are we back in the 80ies? But then I ask: why do you keep the old C64 compos then? Hey, what's this? Those below-10-MHz machines with their crappy gfx & music. Anyway: who uses a C64 today? Naah, we don't need this shit anymore. But why do they keep this shit? Yes, because it's cool. It's cool because it's limited and the C64 dudes still do amazing things with it. But don't the A/A dudes also do great things with their limited text-screens? Yes, they definitely do! But having an A/A compo? No. My opinion is, that more demoparties should include A/A compos. And not only pictures, perhaps even demos! Have you ever seen A/A animations? Just amazing what you can do with a resolution of 80x50!
Well, that was all I have to say about this topic so far. If you are a die-hard A/A freak or A/A designer don't hesitate to mail me URLs/filez/stuff about A/A. As I said, I'm no A/A insider, I just try to make some more or less cool stuff with it and enjoy it to watch what other people have done. I'm very interested to learn more about the A/A scene, so mail me!!!
Yep, all right, FEEDBACK IS WELCOME.
P.S.: Currenty I'm coding an A/A picture editor. If there's anyone outside who wanna help me, contact me. Mainly I need some ideas of a real expert what to do better. But please ask me before you start your criticism, because it maybe that I already plan to include that groovy function but just was too lazy yet. See http://members.xoom.com/hcr/ for infos.