ascii art

16 Articles

Ancient Fonts Are Fontastic!

February 6, 2016 by 14 Comments

Doing some 8-bit ASCII art, but can’t remember where you left your copy of MicroKnight for the Amiga? Or maybe you just need some low-res-but-high-style bitmap fonts to go with your LED pixel array. No fear! Maze.io is cataloguing old text-mode fonts for you.

Textmode.es has a slew of new and old text art from both the Amiga and PC scenes. Rendering some of these correctly really relies on having the right font, so the parser piece reads many different art file formats and renders them with the requested fonts. There’s ASCII, sure, but also ICE Draw, PCBoard, Artworx, and many more. But piece needs the right fonts to do its work, which brings us back to Maze.io.

So whether you’re interested in new or old text-mode art, or just in need of some pixels to push around, have a look at Maze.io. And if you see any ROMs out there with interesting fonts, let them know.

Title image credit trueschool.se

ASCII Art With Pure Data And A Typewriter

April 21, 2015 by 19 Comments

[vtol] is quickly becoming our favorite technological artist. Just a few weeks ago he graced us with a Game Boy Camera gun, complete with the classic Game Boy printer. Now, he’s somehow managed to create even lower resolution images with a modified typewriter that produces ASCII art images.

As with everything dealing with typewriters, machine selection is key. [vtol] is using a Brother SX-4000 typewriter for this build, a neat little daisy wheel machine that’s somehow still being made today. The typewriter is controlled by an Arduino Mega that captures an image from a camera, converts it to ASCII art with Pure Data and MAX/MSP, then slowly (and loudly) prints it on a piece of paper one character at a time.

The ASCII art typewriter was recently shown at the 101 Festival where a number of people stood in front of a camera and slowly watched a portrait assemble itself out of individual characters. Check out the video of the exhibit below.

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