News

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

Today marks the release of Fire's 38th artpack, in which I've released one new logo: a tribute to the Mutt e-mail client.

The artwork and gallery sections have been updated accordingly, and you can also view the pack on 16colo.rs.

1 artwork, 1 release

Fire's 37th artpack has been released a few days ago, and despite the fact I haven't managed to be as active as I would have hoped, I still submitted a logo.

The artwork and gallery sections have been updated accordingly, and the pack is of course also available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

Have a nice Summer 2023!

1 artwork, 1 release

Another year, and another Fire pack has been released. I updated the artwork section and the gallery with three new logos, and look forward to drawing even more during the upcoming year. Stay tuned!

As always, the pack is also available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

3 artworks, 1 release

After a two-year hiatus (this feels familiar by now!), I'm once again back in business and have been releasing two new logos in Fire's 35th artpack. This provided a much needed break and I'm hoping to stick around for a longer time, so expect more stuff from me in 2023.

As always, the pack is also available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

2 artworks, 1 release

As hinted in my previous post, I released an artpack yesterday under the "Cubism" umbrella, and updated the artwork and gallery sections accordingly. Strictly speaking, it's technically not a solopack, as one of the piece is a collaboration with Burps.

As always, the pack is also available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

8 artworks, 1 release

A new version of the site had been deployed today, featuring a new design which includes a brand new header logo and colorscheme. Text is now rendered using Spleen 16x32, with Blockzone still being used for the image viewer captions.

There are still some minor alignement and pagination issues remaining, which will be fixed in the upcoming future.

On other news, I'm working on a solopack which I hope to release this fall.

The second artpack from Sauna has been released a few days ago, and I managed to draw a few logos for this release over the course of the summer.

As always, the pack is available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

Have a nice Summer 2020!

3 artworks, 1 release

As we are slowly approaching 2020, some of us have been feeling the urge to relax and spend time drawing ANSi. Luckily, Ivan had the brilliant idea to build a sauna and invite some friends over! I was happy to join the party and hammer function keys to put some blocks on canvas.

As a result, Sauna first artpack has been released in September, and I have a couple of logos in this release.

The pack is available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

2 artworks, 1 release

Fuel #29 has been released at the end of March, and I managed to have one logo in this pack. As usual, the artwork, gallery, and releases section have been updated.

The pack is available for viewing on 16colo.rs.

1 artwork, 1 release

After a two-year hiatus, I have returned to ANSI in May 2017, and have been releasing with Fuel. We also managed to release a new Fire Dream pack with Sylvao, including some new joints.

I've finally been updating the artwork and releases sections, as well as the gallery. Expect more stuff to come during the following months.

11 artworks, 5 releases

The site has moved from untergrund.net, update your bookmarks!

On other news, life has been pretty busy and I haven't been drawing in a while, something I plan to act upon. I have not been totally away from ANSi and ASCii though, as I'm still doing updates to Ansilove/C.

I'm somehow still active and released some ANSi logos in Blocktronics "Year of the Block" artpack back in February, along with some Amiga ASCii stuff in Break!Ascii #07 which was released in April.

These packs are available for viewing on Sixteen Colors here and here.

On other news, the Razor 1911 10th Anniversary Collection is now available on the Internet Archive.

Have a nice Summer 2015!

4 artworks, 2 releases

Blocktronics "WTF4" artpack has been released in August, followed by Break!Ascii #05 in September. As always, these packs are available for viewing on Sixteen Colors here and here.

How would it be if you could see the world through my eyes?

2 artworks, 2 releases

Another pack, another update. The fourth artpack from Break has been released, and is already available on Sixteen Colors.

On other news, I've been browsing through links I bookmarked over time, and enjoyed reading about BBS history lately. I especially enjoyed the BBS Ads Collection (an unofficial online version of bac-v10.zip published in PAiN issue #54 back in 2003), as well as the Spaceball BBS ad collection. Although not scene related, the Fidonet Nodelist history search site is well worth a look as well.

Lastly, Josh from Break Into Chat has put together a nice BBS-related podcasts collection.

That's it, have a nice Summer 2014! <3

1 artwork, 1 release

The eighth artpack from Blocktronics (entitled "1980") has been released, and as always, you can view it on Sixteen Colors. After the craziness of 2013 I needed a few months break from drawing and only have one new logo this time. However, with Summer being just around the corner, I might be a bit more active during the following months.

1 artwork, 1 release

Against all odds, here comes the second artpack from Fire Dream!

This pack contains art from Sylvao and myself drawn since our last release in December 2012. We are not sure if there will ever be a third pack yet as it's becoming harder and harder to find time to draw ANSi, but then again this pack was totally unexpected, so who knows? :)

You can download the pack in the release section and it should be available for viewing on Sixteen Colors pretty soon.

1 release

The seventh artpack from Blocktronics (entitled "Blockalypse") has been released, followed by the third installment from Break a few days later. I updated the release section to add the two new packs.

On that topic, Fire Dream second release is upcoming and will be out in the next couple of days.

2 releases

2013 has been a fantastic year for the artscene, and following the release of Blocktronics "Awaken" back in April, a lot of artists came out of retirement to produce some of the most impressive artworks our scene has ever witnessed.

I managed to draw a lot myself as well, as I'm adding 21 artworks with this update, including some joints with my friend Sylvao, and a second Fire Dream artpack is upcoming! Most of those pieces are ANSis but I've also started drawing ASCii again, both newschool PC and Amiga styles. I can't honestly remember when was the last time I drew so much. If nothing elses, it proves that given enough motivation, there is always a way to make time for ANSi.

As some of those files are not yet released in artpacks, I will update the site to add the packs once they come out.

21 artworks, 4 releases

Spring has finally arrived, and with it, a new Blocktronics pack has been released!

Despite a busy schedule and important changes coming up, I'm happy I managed to draw something for the pack, which you can view on Sixteen Colors.

So, where do we go from now? Nobody knows when the next iteration will be released, or if there will ever be another one, but I guess that's the beauty of it: drawing every ANSi like it was the last one ever. For the record, I started drawing ANSi in the Summer of 1996, and joined the scene in 1997 at the age of 16, sixteen years ago... It now feels like it's been a lifetime, especially since this site and Ansilove will be 10 years old in a few months.

Greetings to everyone still drawing ANSi in 2013, and stay true to the game, whatever happens.

Pour la légende!

1 artwork, 1 release

Happy New Year 2013 everyone!

Against all odds, Fire Dream first artpack has been released in late December 2012. As usually, I updated the artwork and gallery sections to feature the new pieces, and you can view the pack on Sixteen Colors as well.

I'm also very happy to announce that Sylvao and myself placed first in the TRSAC 2012 Demoparty ANSi competition.

7 artworks, 1 release

Another year has passed, and it's been a busy one! However, I've been able to sneak a couple of hours there and there to dedicate to my scene activities, and it's time for the usual Winter report :)

First of all, Ansilove/PHP 1.10 has been released, it is a minor update allowing to correctly render files saved with recent versions of PabloDraw. It also contains a new and updated documentation file in AsciiDoc format, which was previously available on the Git repository. Earlier this year, I also released AnsiGo, a simple ANSi to PNG converter written in Go, which can be especially appealing to Windows users as the converter is just a single .EXE file.

Additionally, I've started drawing some Teletext art (something I wanted to do since a long time), and some of my screens have been broadcasted on YLE Teletext (Finnish National TV Station) in March and on ARD Teletext (German National TV Station) in August, as part of the International Teletext Art Festival. Following these happenings, I also opened a "Text Mode artist" resume page, in order to list my museum and exhibitions appearances.

Last but not least, BBS and Minitel nostalgics should check the BBS and Minitel Archives and Minitel.org.

I'm very pleased to mention that some of my ANSi artworks are now part of Davis Museum (Barcelona, Spain) permanent collection, with one of them also displayed in their featured artworks section. I should also mention that for this occasion, I finally took the time to write a small biography which can be read here.

In case you missed it, Ansilove/PHP 1.09 has been released in late November, adding support for Amiga ANSi (Bold, Italics, and Underlined characters), options to split the output into several files, and some memory usage optimizations.

You can download it here.

Happy New Year 2012 everyone!

Today, November 8th, I'm releasing the third Spleen artpack entitled "ANSi meets Web", which is, accordingly, quite different from the two previous releases as it contains icons and logos I created for various websites projects I've been working on. I'm also very happy to announce that Sylvao and myself placed first in the Evoke 2011 Demoparty ANSi competition and won a really nice trophy you can admire here and here! As usual, I've been updating the 'artwork' and 'gallery' sections to add all the new pieces.

In other news, the almighty Sixteen Colors site is back in action with a brand new stack, thanks to the efforts of Brian Cassidy, and this time, it seems it's here to stay! Also, for those of you running Mac OS X, you'll be happy to know that Ascension, a native ASCii viewer by Stefan Vogt is now available on this platform, and that support for ANSi and other artscene formats will be introduced in the upcoming 2.0 version which will embbed the Ansilove rendering library.

Last but not least, Ansilove/PHP 1.08 has *FINALLY* been released! This version adds new improved Amiga fonts with corrected aspect ratio and 100% accurate characters, along with a couple of new customization options.

You can download it here.

4 artworks, 2 releases

Almost five years have passed since I released my solo ASCii project Spleen. Today, I released a second artpack (containing ANSi this time), and updated the galleries too. The pack is quite small again, but hey, it's 2010. Ansilove should get an update soon as well, a new version is almost ready and have been sleeping on my HD since way too long now... I will try my best to release it as soon as possible.

Happy New Year 2011, a bit in advance!

3 artworks, 1 release

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 https://www.ascii-codes.com, 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), among 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 colorboxes. You can get all information about everything and links to some articles and picture galleries here and here. The event was covered by GETV, and you can view the video online. While looking for the link on YouTube, I also unexpectedly found a video of chumbys scrolling some ANSis. 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 Vimeo, and you can also download the full quality video files here and 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 information. Have fun and enjoy!