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ANSI animation for a Telnet BBS

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mbbrutman

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I'm cracking up now because I've dug out an old ANSI animation I did over 20 years ago. (File date is 05/10/1986) I got it on the 386 and had my Windows machine and my Linux machine connect to the 386, which sent the file over using my homebrew TCP/IP.

Well, the last time I saw an ANSI animation it came over the modem at 2400 bits per second, so it actually was an animation. With the 386-40 pushing hundreds of kilobytes per second, it was more like a screen refresh. :)

The cool thing is that Windows Telnet, Putty Telnet and XTerm all respond correctly to generic ANSI escape codes. So the Telnet BBS can be in color, do screen positioning, etc.

Argh, still so much more to do though ..
 
mbbrutman said:
I'm cracking up now because I've dug out an old ANSI animation I did over 20 years ago. (File date is 05/10/1986) I got it on the 386 and had my Windows machine and my Linux machine connect to the 386, which sent the file over using my homebrew TCP/IP.

Well, the last time I saw an ANSI animation it came over the modem at 2400 bits per second, so it actually was an animation. With the 386-40 pushing hundreds of kilobytes per second, it was more like a screen refresh. :)

The cool thing is that Windows Telnet, Putty Telnet and XTerm all respond correctly to generic ANSI escape codes. So the Telnet BBS can be in color, do screen positioning, etc.

Argh, still so much more to do though ..
Click to expand...

:cool: Hi,
I hope you mean ASCII animation ...

ANSI = American National Standards Institute ...

ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange ...

Hence characters you type including the ASCII Line Characters used for ASCII pictographs etc...

I have hundreds of them packed away on a disc somewhere ... I collected most off the BBS I used to run in the mid-1980's to early 1990's "the MIDI-Exchange BBS" ...

 
wperko said:
I hope you mean ASCII animation ...
Click to expand...

No, the ASCII codes correspond only to the 255 characters defined by that standard. I.e. code 65 (decimal) corresponded to an upper case A.

The ANSI standard contained various escape sequences that allowed the user to set colors, highlights, flashing, cursor movement, etc.

ANSI animation would be the correct term.
 
If we're nit-picking, I think the last ASCII standard only defined the first 128 characters, and everything beyond that is more or less vendor-specific extentions, like IBM's variant vs ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1). The ANSI animations use the IBM extended character set with graphic symbols not present in 7-bit ASCII.
 
Since we are nit-picking ...

ANSI animation and ASCII are entirely two different topics. ANSI animation can be done with either the standard ASCII set (chars 0 to 127) or with the IBM extended character set. It really does matter, as the two issues are orthogonal.

And to nit-pick there, I just lied a little bit. The ANSI escape sequences are based on the definition of the ASCII ESC character ...
 
I don't think I've ever seen an "ASCII" animation unless you were just drawing with ASCII characters and calling cls or something in a batch file (or I suppose a programming language without color).

But yeah, I used to love that in BBS games and some of the menu's we created for several BBSs by drawing with ANSI/color and the moving the cursor and continuing to get a nice animation going.

TradeWars was always one of my favorites because of that experience.. blowing up a ship in a mostly text based game and getting a cool little window showing the explosion or docking to a starbase with blinking lights heh. Once I was out of highschool though my freetime diminished as well as my eagerness to be drawing ANSI menu's and trying to customize my BBS.

Of course after a while you had to worry about ANSI bombs which sorta sucked. You could download a zipped file from a BBS (I mean you could techincally embed it in a BBS menu file but that would be less common) however when you were unzipping a file in dos it would dump out the header info (if someone included it) usually with a tag from the uploader or BBS however if you had ansi.sys loaded and it was color it had the ability to macro a key on your keyboard for whatever they thought was amusing. (Macro the character : to change the color to black, cd \, deltree /s /y *.*) or something else retarded. Not that I ever had that happen. Actually more malicious was to dump ASM or ML to a text file then pipe it to debug.com and have it compile a virus for you.

I gave a presentation on that stuff a few years ago. It was a presentation on general viruses and technology not just ANSI, I was just pointing out some things people have forgotten about that will likely crop back up.

- John
 
haha awesome mike

actually a while back i had created a little VB6 app that lets you telnet in, lets you select from a menu of ANSI animations, and then sends it but uses timer waits to simulate it being sent over a dial up modem so its the proper speed.
 
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