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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Roguelike demo
Space Invaders demo
I’ve been talking about adding a textmode view to Alchemy for quite a while. In fact, it was the single reason I started playing with the technology in the first place. After seeing Flashterm, Scott Petersen (the lead engineer behind Alchemy) challenged me to port the classic NetHack, a roguelike text game. Since that time, I’ve played with text convertors, particles systems, and 3D graphics, but never managed to get a reasonable result for textmode – until now, that is.
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One of the main reasons I started playing around with Alchemy a while back was to experiment with some of my favorite textmode libraries, specifically AA-Lib, which is the most commonly used image-to-ascii-art library of the bunch (has been used with Quake, VLC Player, and many other desktop programs) . It’s a frequently requested port among ascii art fans, and I’m glad to finally release it for everybody to use.
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After spending so much time lately experimenting with Alchemy, I thought I’d revisit my early attempt at a real-time ASCII converter (yes, I have a textmode obsession). TextFX7 (the C++ library I’m using for the conversion) has built-in Color and Block modes which I’ve been wanting to implement. Of course there were a few hurdles along the way, but I learned some valuable lessons about porting Visual C++ and Windows projects to Alchemy.
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