News

This is the news section. Once in a while, something might happen. Come back from time to time! <3

Happy New Year 2010!

I've been spending some time improving the site during the last couple of days, cleaning up the markup and making it semantic. I also moved the videos from Youtube to Vimeo, which is offering better image quality and the possibility to download the original video files.

I'm also currently working on a new version of Ansilove, which has been enhanced to match requirements of AsciiArena, a new site dedicated to Amiga ASCii collies which I warmly invite you to check out!

Ansilove/PHP 1.07 has been released!

This version adds support for thumbnails rendering with configurable maximum height, and customizable output color definitions in the configuration file for CED mode rendering. The ANSi parser has also been modified to allow ansi sequences with inverted graphic rendition values to render correctly.

You can download it here.

Ansilove/PHP 1.06 has been released!

All the fonts have been dumped again to make the font collection more homogeneous and avoid minor character differences between fonts as much as possible, and 6 new PC Fonts have been added (Charsets : Armenian, French Canadian, Greek (CP869), Icelandic, Persian, Portuguese). Minor color palette problems causing the full intensity RGB value to be 252 instead of 255 have been fixed. The configuration file now supports customizable file extensions definitions for DIZ mode rendering, and some filters removing white spaces and empty lines at the beginning and end of DIZ files have been implemented.

You can download it here.

A new ASCii table has been put online at http://www.ascii-codes.net, including character symbols in PNG which are 100% accurate to the original DOS fonts! It features 14 MS-DOS charsets and can be useful for coders and for all ASCii and ANSi art lovers around!

I also would like to point people to the excellent Flashterm, a Flash telnet client by Peter Nitsch which can be embedded in web pages. He also released a Flash ansi library coming along with a viewer. Great stuff!

Ansilove/PHP 1.05 has been released!

This version adds support for PCBoard file format and fixes the CED rendering mode which was broken. This release also feature 1 new example ANSi by Ansichrist (which competed and ranked second at Breakpoint 2009 Ascii/Ansi compo) and 1 new example ASCii by dMG. Thanks for the art guys!

You can download it here.

Ansilove/PHP 1.04 has been released on April 7th and its website has been redesigned as well!

This version adds support for 9 new PC Fonts (Charsets: Baltic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin1, Latin2, Nordic, Russian, Turkish), a loader to launch the command line converter under Windows, and fixes some minor bugs and warnings. The documentation has been updated as well in order to provide more usage examples and instructions. A new version featuring support for PCBoard files will be released soon, so stay tuned!

You can download it here.

The new version of the site is finally online! Here is the changes list :

• Site redesign using full CSS and jQuery
• Dropped coppermine gallery and replaced it by self-made thumbnails and a state of the art jQuery based image viewer (jQuery Lightbox)
• Added ANSi and ASCii video scrollers in the artwork section
• Added videos of Totem diskmag and BBStros in the coding and BBS sections
• Added videos of JFF intros on Demoscene TV
• Added video links to the BBS Documentary in the BBS section

A new version of Ansilove is also on its way, and will include a loader for PCBoard files (.PCB), amongst other things :)

ANSi is alive, and even better, is getting exposure outside the artscene as well!

In January 2008, an ANSi exhibition was held in an art gallery in San Francisco. Some special hardware scrollers were created specially for the show, along with custom made lightboxes. You can get all informations about everything and links to some articles and picture galleries here and here. The event was covered by GETV, and you can view the reportage online, the video is embedded above. While looking for the link on YouTube, I also unexpectedly found a video of chumbys scrolling some ANSis which I included in this post as well. I also added some pictures of friends displaying ANSi and ASCii on their iPhones, emphasizing the fact that this art-form is not confined to computers : on the left you can see Zes showing "CL!-ELIT.ANS", and on the right, Chef is showing us "CL!-EL.ANS".

In other news, the excellent website Sixteen Colors has been upgraded to a new version, with improved site design and enhanced efficiency, and is now also featuring an informative news section and some forums as well. There is a new group in town too, called Blocktronics, so explore their website to get their artpacks and check their YouTube channel containing some ANSi videos, which is well worth watching also.

Almost three years since my last update. Long time indeed, and a lot of changes, too. I'm now living in Poland since December 2007, and graduated from university this October. It is now wintertime, and I finally have some time to dedicate to some projects which have been sleeping since years. Amongst them, one was to convert my two 64Kb intros "Folk" and "Le Museum" released for JFF into video files. I was able to do this quite easily using DOSBox and some tips from the excellent Wurst Captures site. They are now available to watch on YouTube, and you can also download the full quality video files here.

Some more stuff will come up during the following weeks, and next time I will post a note about what's going on in the Artscene, as some pretty interesting things happened lately. A site redesign should also follow, and I eventually have plans to release a new version of Ansilove to include Polish and Russian charsets, as well as some other slavic and baltic languages ones.

That's all for now. Happy new year 2009!

2 videos

The first (and most probably last) pack of Spleen, an experimental ASCii project of mine, has been released yesterday and is available in the release section. I added my 3 new ASCiis along with the site title XBiN in the galleries.

Ansilove/PHP 1.02 has been released today, and it will be the final release, features wise. Next versions (if any) will only contain bugfixes. It now supports ANSi (.ANS), BiNARY (.BIN), ADF (.ADF), iDF (.IDF), TUNDRA (.TND) and XBiN (.XB) formats and also contains an online file converter.

Nothing more to say.

Future is now!

Goodbye.

4 artworks, 1 release, 1 link

Massive update! New site design, with fixed colors :)

Added a BBS section dedicated to my old BBS system, called "Da Prophecy", and a MISC section containing graphics, modules, articles I wrote for Diskmags, along with artpacks from the hirez group Moonrise.

Ansilove/PHP 1.01 has been released. It contains 6 new Amiga fonts, .DIZ detection for optimal rendering with the exact needed number of columns, and some bugfixes.

-1+9 links

Ansilove/PHP 1.00 has finally been released!

Ansilove/PHP is a set of tools to convert ANSi and artscene related file formats into PNG images, supporting ANSi (.ANS), BiNARY (.BIN), and ADF (.ADF) formats. It includes an all purposes command line converter, along with a library to use on web pages for doing "on the fly" conversions.

You can download it here.

Happy new year 2006 :)

Sense Imagery released its 25th artpack so here comes an update. I added my two new ansis in the galleries, name and date of each artwork, and a zip file containing some old unreleased stuff from 1997-1998 in the artwork section.

You can also find some scans from a French magazine containing reviews of the Wired'98 Skytech demo "Deus Ex Machina" I was involved with. Articles date back from September and October 1998, check them out in the coding section.

2 artworks, 1 release

Site moved to untergrund.net! I finally found some time to move the page and do some updates.

You can now find some artscene and demoscene related video and audio content in the explanatory part of the artwork and coding sections. I added pictures from demoparties I went to in the about section, a video from myself presenting "Le Museum" 64Kb intro at Slach Party 3, and some links to pouet.net for each production in the coding section. I also uploaded a previously unreleased PCBoard PPE I did for Nitrophusion in 1997, called "Scrolly Message". The package was sleeping in an old backup, you can now find it in the releases section.

Last but not least, there is now a gallery to browse the artwork section more easily.

More stuff will come soon!

1 release, 15 links

Quite a long time since the last update, and quite a lot to say also. Things have been very slow in the artscene, 27" died in April because of inactivity, so I'm now releasing my art in Sense Imagery. On a personal side, it has been a busy year, I've been living for 3 months in Brisbane (Australia), which is a truly amazing and beautiful city, and have been studying and working the rest of the time.

I'm also very happy to have finally got myself a hold on a copy of an old french magazine I used to read, which featured an article about ANSI.SYS, dating back from December 1993. I'm publishing the scanned article here: Page 01, Page 02.

3 artworks, 2 release, 17 links

The new 27" artpack is out, so here's an update! I'm being a bit more productive and have 3 new ansis this time :) I also added the names of people I jointed with in the artwork section of the site, and quite a lot of new scene links for you to explore! Be sure to check the excellent TundraDraw by Veediot here. Grab the CVS version and enjoy the multi-platform ANSi editor which will help making the winter nights great!

3 artworks, 1 release, -1+21 links

Quick update! Nothing to say, really... Summer is here and it'll be nice and hot for sure! And by the way, the site isn't pink, damnit! Not on my screen anyway... :) So if you see it pink, then your monitor is too light and you're going to be blind within the next few years! :)

1 artwork, 1 release, -2+2 links

After a one year hiatus from the scene, I'm back into ANSi drawing and teamed up with my friends from 27 Inch. So here comes a little update. More stuff is coming up within the next months... Stay tuned! :)

3 artworks, 2 releases, 13 links

Opening of the site! After some weeks of work, it is finally online. All the ASCii/ANSi on this site have been converted to image files with my own .ANS => .PNG converter written in PHP, which will be released in GPL as soon as I find some time to make it more user friendly. Feel free to send me a mail, feedback is always highly appreciated. Look into the "About" section for contact informations. Have fun and enjoy!