Check out Viewtronics!
The best things in life are often silly, and in this case gloriously retro. Blocktronics, a collective of the best textmode artists around the world, have released their second art pack entitled “Codename Chris Wirth” in homage to the legendary ANSI artist RaD Man. No, it’s not 1995, and yes, this kind of art is still being produced in stunning fashion.
Along with the pack, this marks the debut of a textmode viewer I’ve been working on for some time called Viewtronics. The project is a refinement of my AS3ANSI engine which powers Flashterm, and includes features such as multiple fonts, zooming, and image generation.
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Thought I would share a viewer tool I wrote that simulates 80×25 line scrolling. It can display any online ANSI file. There is an address bar at the bottom that can launch other files, or you could direct link into it by adding a “file” URL parameter. Here are a few links to my favorite works online:
sixteen colors by tainted
Center by zeroVision
Pharcyde by h7
blocktronics logo (b7) by avg
Scum by Noches & zeroVision
Adding telnet functionality was a logical and relatively simple step to take with AS3 ANSI. Connecting to various BBS's also served as a great testing environment for the viewer. Consequently, many display bugs were fixed. Most notably, I managed to nail down several bugs that involved cursor positioning.
One major change that I had to implement to the viewer was moving over entirely to Bitmap drawing routines. The Sprite drawing method was just proving to be inflexible with operations like scrolling and transformations. One drawback from the switch is being limited to the 2,880 (double in F10) pixel size restriction.
A few new parameters were added to the viewer:
Actionscript:
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AnsiViewer( columnWidth:Number=80, lineHeight:Number=24, scroll:Boolean=true )
The height and width parameters are meant to lock a screen resolution size, like a regular terminal window. Scrolling pushes the 'screen' content higher depending on your locked height.
So where's the online demo? Well, there isn't one. Since I don't run a BBS of my own, I can't write the necessary policy files required to establish a socket connection to a port. If you run your own telnet site, this library could be useful for providing users access through a browser. To be honest, I just built it for fun, but if you're a Sysop and want your BBS running in your website drop me a line and I can help you out.
Here's how you use it:
Actionscript:
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import net.peternitsch.ansi.telnet.TelnetSession;
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import net.peternitsch.ansi.viewer.AnsiViewer;
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var viewer:AnsiViewer = new AnsiViewer(80, 25);
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addChild( viewer.getBitmap() );
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var session:TelnetSession = new TelnetSession(viewer, "site.com", 23);
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session.start();
The library is still beta, but feel free to comment with any requests, suggestions, or rants. I'm still planning on adding 80x50 support, JPG export, and baud speed control.
Check out the source.
I've always been a huge fan of the ANSI art scene, having spent too many hours surfing BBSes back in the early 90's. Even these days, I kill time searching Sixteen Colors for old ACiD and iCE packs along with newer works (yes, the scene is still alive).
As a personal project for the last month, I've been writing an AS3 parser for ANSI codes. I used Zeh Fernando's Perfect DOS VGA 437 Font for the character set, and wrote the escape sequence logic from scratch (Zeh wrote an AS2 ANSi Viewer, which I didn't use as reference). Yesterday I finally finished the parsing. In the next few weeks I'll be adding features, and cleaning up the parsing code which will eventually end up on to code.google. Any comments and suggestions on the direction this thing should take are welcome.
Check it out.
