Amiga ANSI Art - What is this style?

[OddbOd]

I'm sure most of you know the Amiga and DOS styles of ASCII/ANSI art but I recently remembered seeing a completely different style that was occasionally used in displayme files and DMS banners that I can't really describe or find any information about. Attached is an example of this "3rd style" ripped from Skid Row's Mavis Beacon disk, note that the only way to display it correctly is in a CLI/Shell, using custom fonts, a text editor or PC based program won't work right because of the escape sequences used.

What is this style called? How were they created/edited? Does anyone have more of these files? Why can't I find any info on the Web about this stuff?

Edit: This is what it should look like:

[illy5603]

If I remember correctly there was a utility that would create these from images so you could use them in ads that would display when you would decompress a DMS disk image. Usually these would be added by a door on the BBS it was leeched from. I currently have a DMS adder running on my bbs but am using regular Amiga ASCII in my ad.

telnet -> spatulacity.servebbs.org

[OddbOd]

While I appreciate the response it doesn't answer any of my questions as I'm already familiar with DMS adders/checkers/repackers.

I should have looked more carefully for tools that can create these ANSIs as there are several of them on aminet including Iff2Ansi which I used to make the abime.net logo attached below.

So that's one question down... can anybody answer any more?

[adolescent]

I've never really seen it used outside of SkidRow releases. But, there are several versions of the Skid Row logo using this technique. (Sorry I'm not more help...)

[Mungo]

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 2? FFS

[mr_0rga5m]

Ahh i used to do this (an before it was used in 'intros' ) .. Its just the top line of 'characters'.
See the pic i output the letters A A A A T A A A A then a space, moving down a pixel (and back 1 char) after every letter output. That draws a cross from the pixels left behind.

[redblade]

I never knew you could move pixels in AmigaDOS ANSI. Interesting.

[AmigaHope]

Yeah it was a pretty nice technique I saw used on many startup-sequences so you could display arbitrary bitmaps. I've seen it used to display color images as well. A long time ago I also saw the Amiga's escape sequences used as a way to display output from a Hebrew-language editor (right-to-left script liked Hebrew and Arabic was totally supported in the fonts and OS rendering routines, but not well supported in actual programs, so you had to use specialized word processors etc, but with the right escape codes they could be displayed fine just dumped to the CLI).

(Amigas were semi-popular in Israel and ridiculously popular in some Arab countries - 70% market share in Iraq in 1990 -- so a fair amount of workaround software got made. This also means that the 1991 Gulf war actually killed Commodore's biggest market in the middle east)

[Phantasm]

Wow... i had completely forgotten about this. Thanks for unlocking those memories lol

[Pfloyd]

Are there any conversion tools for this kind of ANSI-Art?

[a4k-oerx]

Find one (including source) in this thread.

[Anachronist]

Hey! aNACHRONiST of iMPURE here. I would not call this an ANSI style as it uses something other than ANSI ESC[ codes for composition. This is pixel art with a tortured and very clever process of manipulating text characters.

[Jope]

It uses ANSI ESC[ codes, but they are Amiga console specific ones.

CSI #p	Name Definition
--- --- ---- -------------------------------------------------
y   1-	aSTO  SET TOP OFFSET (private Amiga sequence)

Or do you mean ANSI as in ansi.sys supported commands only? :-)

[Galahad/FLT]

Just PM Subzero on here as im pretty sure he was the one who did those ansi screens for Skid Row

[Anachronist]

Interesting! I have to say that even if the method of pixel manipulation is accomplished via special CSI sequences, to me it's still pixel art. In "Amiga ASCII"(Topaz ANSI) and Codepage 437 ANSI the art is composed of the characters, not by graphic effects.

I still think it is a very cool effect though and would also like to see more examples

[Retroplay]

There's an ANSI editor (Died v2.8c) on Compact #056 (1991)(Skid Row).

[Subzero]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Just PM Subzero on here as im pretty sure he was the one who did those ansi screens for Skid Row

you know me Phill, indeed me did most of ascii or intro text all the time, as for this ascii. there was a tool for, but cant remember the name ... hmmm
iff2ansi was the tool

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Retroplay

There's an ANSI editor (Died v2.8c) on Compact #056 (1991)(Skid Row).

I checked on EAB ftp, and 'Compact #056 (1991)(Skid Row).zip' includes an ADF with the file 'died2.8c' which is infected with the "BBS Why 3" virus according to VirusZ III.

EDIT:

After testing a few different programs on aminet, the HyperANSI editor seems pretty good:
http://aminet.net/package/text/edit/hypansi_v108

EDIT2:
Tried to modify an existing ANSI drawing...

[nocash]

That eab_skull_greeting example is a bit misplaced here: It's not pixel art, it's not using workbench colors, and it's not using the amiga character set.

Altogether it looks like MSDOS ANSI with EGA/VGA font and colors, which isn't Amiga related at all, except...

The HISTORY.TXT file HyperANSI mentions "Setting up a BBS", so apparently there have been two ANSI variants in use on Amiga:
1) Workbench ANSI for things like commandline tools and readme files.
2) MSDOS-style ANSI-terminals when going online via dial-up modems.

[Photon]

The pic in OP is gone (DropBox is the only file sharing service you can still trust!), but I'm assuming this is the 8x1-rasterization using an 8x8 font that you could see printing in the CLI window back in the day.

It works by using ANSI control codes to do partial line feeds, I'm assuming. I never actually used it myself.

If this is the type of ANSI art you mean OddBod, then what modrobert posted is not the same art, and there is no editor for it. It would be way too much work to hand-art 8x the text. There was likely an IFF to ANSI converter, as SubZero says. The art would be made as a picture, and then a good converter could get it close or acceptable to original, while reducing it to close to 1/8 the data.

While losing fidelity and prints slowly, it looks kinda neat and techy.