
Show HN: Artpacks.org – Archive of the ANSI and ASCII art scene (1990 to present) - sjs382
http://artpacks.org
======
ctide
My BBS: [http://artpacks.org/1995/ice9507a.zip/MA-
UNH1.ICE](http://artpacks.org/1995/ice9507a.zip/MA-UNH1.ICE)

I was never especially good at making art, but this was my favorite of the
things I did make: [http://artpacks.org/1995/fsn-0895.zip/CT-
ASY.ANS](http://artpacks.org/1995/fsn-0895.zip/CT-ASY.ANS)

I feel bad for people who were born too late and missed out on the whole BBS
scene. Those years were tons of fun, and nothing on the internet has ever been
quite like that world.

------
pjbrunet
I was in GRiM around ~1992 and an iCE trial artist ~1993 ;-) But I'm probably
not in any of these packs. I didn't make it into iCE though, I heard there was
some kind of Canadian merger and the management changed.

I first discovered all these ansis on Sanctuary in 305. I never met Tempus
Thales but I think we lived in the same neighborhood. I got enough positive
feedback from my ansis that I went on to get a BFA in studio art.

~~~
siegecraft
I almost made it into iCE when MiRAGE (formerly DREAM? I think.. Shihear
Kallizard ran it) merged, but I think I was inactive at the time and I really
wasn't an iCE-level artist). But I have no copies of my old art and I have
never found any online so time to start digging through these.

~~~
pjbrunet
Mirage, that sounds familiar. My impression was ACiD and iCE were the two top
groups and you had to be pretty good to get in. Everything was tenebristic
because of the way the ansi colors mixed (had no idea what tenebrism was) and
the subject matter was almost entirely games/comics characters.

~~~
siegecraft
Well apparently DREAM (which was a WWIVnet based ANSI group led by Shihear
Kallizard) became LTD, or split into LTD and something else.. I was able to
find a few of my works for LTD on sixteen colors and they are pretty bad.

------
jzzskijj
Don't forget [http://asciiarena.com/](http://asciiarena.com/)

It has the history of Amiga's Ascii scene. 3879 collys.

If someone is not familiar with the term "ascii colly": It was (usually) a
.txt file made by a single person. As they originated from Amiga scene, they
were mostly in latin1 encoding. In many cases released under some group's
name. A typical colly featured 20-60 requested or gifted ascii logos,
foreword, index of logos, greetings, respects, some other messages. And of
course guest art from other artists (for artist logo, group logo, file_id.diz
or headers for "greetings", "respects" etc.). In these text files the
file_id.diz was put between @BEGIN_FILE_ID.DIZ and @END_FILE_ID.DIZ tags.

Too bad the site is going down, because the site, as it is today, is consuming
too much of the server resources. Some handy web developer could save the
site. Currently it seems that there isn't a person in "today's" Amiga scene
who had the time or skills to save the site.

~~~
lubujackson
Please have them contact the archive team, I guarantee they'd want to at least
backup all of this:
[http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page)

------
tdicola
Nice work! There's a great presentation from BSides Las Vegas a few years ago
about the ANSI art scene, definitely worth checking out if anyone is
interested:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILNs1GChGDk)

~~~
andy_herbert
There are still a couple of ANSI and ASCII art groups with quite an active
membership. Perhaps the most notable is Blocktronics:
[http://blocktronics.org](http://blocktronics.org)

~~~
sjs382
And don't forget Break ([http://breakascii.org/](http://breakascii.org/)) &
Impure! :)

------
bane
Fantastic! Anybody know what's being used to render the art as PNGs? Anybody
know of a Python library that does the same thing?

I've just realized how much I'd love it if these were distributed as cbz
files.

Side note, if the demoscene represents the "high-art" movement in computer art
(at least art that originates pre-internet), then the ANSI scene is like the
underground graffiti movement.

Their art literally "tagged" every page of every BBS I went to, and being both
art scenes, there was some interesting overlaps sometimes between the two
scenes (some ANSI groups made demos/intro, some demo groups made ANSI/ASCII
art, both had deep roots in computer piracy), but a definite different
identity that I'm glad to see has survived to this day.

It's also thrilling to see both scenes alive and fairly vibrant today.

I kind of wish there was a post-ANSI art scene, maybe using unicode, or
encoded HTML <div> tags or something equally crazy and inventive.

~~~
pjbrunet
"I kind of wish there was a post-ANSI art scene, maybe using unicode, or
encoded HTML <div> tags or something equally crazy and inventive."

If you look at the early issues of WIRED magazine, I would say that's the
post-ANSI aesthetic, but that's just my opinion. 1994 and the Internet really
killed off the BBS thing fast, otherwise I think Ripterm (or something like
it) would have replaced ANSI because modems were getting faster
[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPS...](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/PROGRAMS/GRAPHICS/RIPSCRIPT/)
For me, 1994 was switching from primarily Pascal, TheDraw & DeluxePaint to
HTML, Photoshop & Java.

As far as the demo scene, I was not really part of that but I think (correct
me if I'm wrong) that was based more on the C64/Amiga which had powerful
graphics/music capabilities way before the PC. So I would guess the demo scene
came first and the ANSI "BBS" art was more a product of the IBM PC-compatible
world. I remember going to an Amiga club meeting and a few of these guys had
big boxes of disks and they would just trade like that, they had limited
Internet access through the local university but they didn't have a BBS.

I offered to host their MODs (Amiga music modules) on my BBS. Because of that,
I had the largest collection of MOD music in the area. It was like Napster
before Napster ;-)

~~~
jzzskijj
Your information about Amiga isn't correct. In Europe Amiga had really vital
Amiga BBS scene. ANSI "BBS" art as a product of IBM-PC world is only true, if
you're talking about this so-called "block ascii" that was made using PC's
CP437 character set. On Amiga there was a huge amount of artists doing "line
ascii" based ansi art for boards (ISO-8859-1).

For example in 1995 in Sweden there were still loads of Amiga boards:
[http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/elite01.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/elite01.txt)

This is the list of boards the list maintainer considered worthy to be listed.

~~~
pjbrunet
Good to know. That was so long ago, it's possible I just had PC-based lists
and forgot there were other lists.

------
sjs382
FYI: There's some hidden navigation on this site.

On desktop devices, use the arrow keys, esc and enter/return.

On mobile, swipe to navigate between ascii and ansi files within a single .zip
file.

------
msmith
The first code I ever shipped was an ANSI viewer that was included in several
artpacks. It's so great that I can still find it after almost 20 years. I
really wish that I'd kept a copy of the source.

------
owenversteeg
Funny that this appears now, because I recently decided that I'd like to get
back into ASCII art by making ASCII art shrimp. Of course, they are less
detailed and smaller in size than much of the artwork here, but that's part of
the fun. I started by asking a few people on tilde.town if they'd like to add
any and fairly quickly I had a decent collection.

You can see them at
[http://tilde.town/~owenversteeg/](http://tilde.town/~owenversteeg/). If you
have any to add, please let me know and I'll put them up!

------
pimlottc
Found a minor bug - files with "%" in the name don't work, e.g.:

[http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%CMTS.ANS](http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%CMTS.ANS)
[http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%FRST.ANS](http://artpacks.org/1997/303pack1.zip/BYM%FRST.ANS)

By sheer chance, these were the first two ones I tried, so I was rather
confused at first...

~~~
jzzskijj
Ah, the same with # if in the pack's name.

------
fln
Can someone explain to me (or provide a link) how you make this type of ascii
art?

I've made this kind of ascii art before and it's boring:
[http://www.incredibleart.org/links/ascii.html](http://www.incredibleart.org/links/ascii.html)

I want to make ascii art like this:
[http://artpacks.org/1990/acidnews.zip/INN.ANS](http://artpacks.org/1990/acidnews.zip/INN.ANS)

See the difference?

~~~
fln
I discovered that the characters used in that style are called "Block" or
"High" ascii and are only found in DOS! That explains why I've never been able
to make that style on linux.

~~~
jzzskijj
PabloDraw is available on Linux if you have Mono and gtk-sharp2.

~~~
fln
Thank you for your comments! I will try this out later today!

------
alricb
Question: How do you scroll in the years and ansi pages?

------
driverdan
This brings back memories. I was never an artist myself but I used some of the
scene art for my BBS in the mid to late 90's. I wish there was a way to search
based on keywords.

Even the tech is interesting. It uses a JSON API at api.artpacks.org to get
the data and renders the art into <canvas> elements.

~~~
sjs382
Thanks for noticing the tech. Its held up under the load pretty well
considering that the files are all only stored in their original .zip format
(rather than unzipped and stored staticly). That, and its hosted on a $5/month
DigitalOcean instance. :-)

The rendering engine indeed renders to canvas and was created by Andy Herbert
([https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove.js](https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove.js)).
It was based on a popular PHP ANSI->PNG library called AnsiLove (written by
Frederick Cambus:
[https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove](https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove))

If anyone wants to build anything on the API, please let me know (email in
profile), and I'll try harder to keep it stable. :-)

Search is coming soon.

If anyone wants to help, the most needed item is RIPscrip rendering. We use
ripscrip.js
([https://github.com/andyherbert/ripscript.js](https://github.com/andyherbert/ripscript.js))
at the moment, but the rendering is broken on a lot of files.

~~~
sjs382
Oh, and Andy is on here too!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andy_herbert](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andy_herbert)

------
pakled_engineer
Mistigris ftw, Al's House of Meat BBS was the most eye searing board I
remember from the early 90s.

------
laichzeit0
Sadly, I think this along with the 90's BBS and demoscene era is something
people born post-Windows 95 will never really "get" because they didn't live
through it. It was an amazing lowtech creative era to be part of growing up.

~~~
JungleGymSam
Absolutely. Such good memories from those days.

------
empressplay
Late last year MiST released our 20th anniversary pack, you can find it on
artpacks.org -- it was interesting seeing everyone back together again (the
power of Facebook I suppose). It looks like we might start releasing regularly
again too!

~~~
sjs382
Its been really surprising how much Facebook is responsible for the recent
uptick in art scene production. Blocktronics has been a huge inspiration to
everyone.

------
raldi
iCE reunion in this thread!

Most of my work was loaders (i.e., code, like
[http://artpacks.org/1995/ice-9506.zip/BZ-
COLRS.EXE](http://artpacks.org/1995/ice-9506.zip/BZ-COLRS.EXE)) and sadly,
artpacks.org can't display those (yet) ... but with the recent major advances
in emulating DOS in Javascript, I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

The one mentioned above had bouncing squares that distorted the pixels
underneath in a way that eventually yielded a psychedelic 320x200 pattern.
Here's a screenshot:
[http://i.imgur.com/VG5ziRP.png](http://i.imgur.com/VG5ziRP.png)

------
evanwolf
Where's the pre-1990 ASCII art? I first saw ASCII art in 1972. Snoopy surfing
and shouting "Kowabunga!" printed on a line printer on the Santa Monica High
School's UNIVAC in 1972. Let's capture the older works too.

~~~
jzzskijj
You mean this stuff?
[http://artscene.textfiles.com/asciiart/snoopy.untab](http://artscene.textfiles.com/asciiart/snoopy.untab)

At least some of it is preserved in textfiles.com.

------
f1nch3r
Pretty amazing seeing stuff I did back in 1995!
[http://artpacks.org/1995/fire1095.zip/SL-
TST.ANS](http://artpacks.org/1995/fire1095.zip/SL-TST.ANS)

I wasn't good, but those were surely some fun days.

------
uptown
Wow. Great stuff. Some friends and I started CiA.

One of my masterpieces: [http://artpacks.org/1996/cia40oz2.zip/TE-
WETHR.JPG](http://artpacks.org/1996/cia40oz2.zip/TE-WETHR.JPG)

~~~
pjbrunet
What did you use for that? POVRay?

~~~
uptown
Probably 3D Studio or 3D Studio MAX which had just come out that year.

------
heegemcgee
Ah, very nice. For those interested, another site with similar goals that
launched last year (i think) was
[http://sixteencolors.net/](http://sixteencolors.net/)

~~~
sjs382
Both have been around quite a while SixteenColors for a bit longer.

Artpacks.org re-launched with a new design and client-side rendering this
year.

------
haliphax
haliphax // remorse / break / pen15 / vinyl / simple / the!click / ruckus /
punc / etc.

:)

------
jedahan
ohh i wonder if theres any PETSCII in there :)

~~~
haliphax
not likely, as PETSCII are actually executables, if I remember correctly.

------
booleanbetrayal
<3 <3 <3

