Comment by tetrisgm
14 hours ago
When I was learning to make games and just hack around the pc, I used to try to copy paste the characters from their nfos to make my own “releases” of mini mods. Didn’t know there were ascii drawing programs! Wonder if you did the same. I’m sure we all did but pre www era made it difficult!
Copy-pasting is a clever way to do it!
I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work.
I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
Damn, more OG than me. I must have looked up to you and your peers back then! It’s crazy how it was so common to just go in a hex editor and mess with files to see what would happen. Would love to see a submission of what you / group / other notables did.
I keep a list of all current ASCII art (and related + other creative tools) editors out there, if you're interested:
https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools
I recommend Moebius for traditional ASCII and ANSI art.
That's sick. Ty for sharing!
I dabble in ASCII art and use Playscii these days. Its still pretty hard to make amazing looking art even with these great tools, which just shows how legendary the demoscene is.