
Show HN: The worst ANSI renderer, except for all the others - hpjansson
https://hpjansson.org/blag/2019/01/07/the-worst-ansi-renderer-except-for-all-the-others/
======
shoo
see also: squeezing 1024 colours out of a 1981 IBM 5150 with a CGA display:

[https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-
al...](https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-
emulators/)

Explanation & pictures of how some of the techniques work:

[https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-
mode-...](https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-
illustrated/)

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christianvozar
Should try rendering some of this.
[http://blocktronics.org](http://blocktronics.org)

~~~
hpjansson
Oh, that's the stuff.

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daleroberts
You can get even better rendering quality if you are willing to use Unicode
9.0 characters:
[https://github.com/daleroberts/tv](https://github.com/daleroberts/tv)

~~~
hpjansson
I'm already using the Unicode block range, and a little from the symbols,
geometry, math and braille ranges. You can turn ranges on/off and combine them
in different ways.

There's ASCII too in some of the examples because I think it works pretty well
as a complement to blocks, when used for dithering only (--fill ascii).

I'm always looking for more Unicode symbols to put to use, though. I think
PETSCII and Teletext symbols are supposed to make it into the standard soon,
if they haven't already.

Edit: Forgot to mention TV looks very good, an actual useful tool for big geo
images.

Edit 2: Here's the PETSCII etc. proposal:
[https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-
prop.pdf](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17435r-terminals-prop.pdf)

Will be a blast when/if it gets adopted and font support catches up.

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chairmanmow
This is great, I've been working on something that tries to do something
similar among other things. ANSI's going to come back in a big way - I got a
hunch!

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hahamrfunnyguy
Now I can finally stop using AcidDraw to build my web site graphics and start
using Chafa instead. More colors to boot!

~~~
chairmanmow
Here's what I made, but I'm keeping it stealth this month. I did make an
editor/Converter, it's not great, but it makes ANSI's, and 256 colors as well.
It's what I did with those ANSI's that's interesting - I stored them in the
blockchain as non-fungible and created a neural network based off them. It's
done, it's coming. Just don't want it all to come too fast.

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_xerxes_
ANSI what? They have overseen many many standards.

~~~
hpjansson
ANSI X3.64 plus almost 30* years of oddball extensions. For a long time, "ANSI
codes" or even just "ANSI" was almost synonymous with that (increasingly
loosely defined) standard, at least in the context of terminal graphics.

Now I'm not sure that still holds, but I decided the post title didn't need to
be even longer and more arcane :)

* Edit: That should be 40, actually. Time flies.

~~~
vetrom
You could always add tek4xxx overlay support.

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pragmatick
As someone who has played around with the ASCII/ANSI output (and knows nothing
about the matter) that's really impressive.

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benj111
So how long will it be before someone puts a gui desktop in a terminal?

~~~
hpjansson
You can get halfway there if you combine Xvfb's -fbdir option and Chafa's
--watch option. Chafa supports the XWD format Xvfb puts out.

Have to do input with xdotool, though :)

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300bps
Background for anyone unfamiliar:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_art)

I would’ve killed for this in 1985.

