ANSI art
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used on bulletin board systems. Like ASCII art, it is created by carefully arranging letters, numbers and symbols on the screen to form rudimentary pictures. But it has two important differences.
First, ANSI art uses a specific character set, IBM code page 437, which contains extra symbols — such as shaded blocks, lines, and bars — beyond the familiar ones seen on the keyboard. These semigraphical characters made a broader range of text art possible on platforms which supported code page 437, such as MS-DOS.[1]
Second, ANSI art supports special "escape codes" for changing the text color from a palette of 16 colors, or moving the cursor around the screen. These codes derive from ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists use the cursor control sequences to create rudimentary animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes often use the .ANSfile extension.
Overview
ANSI art is considerably more flexible than ASCII art, because the particular character set it uses contains symbols intended for drawing, such as a wide variety of box-drawing characters and block characters that dither the foreground and background color. It also adds accented characters and math symbols that often find creative use among ANSI artists.
The popularity of ANSI art encouraged the creation of a powerful shareware package called TheDraw coded by Ian E. Davis in 1986. It simplified the process of making an ANSI art screen from scratch, provided a variety of "fonts", large letters constructed from box and block characters, and enabled transition animations such as dissolve and clock. The last public version of the editor, version 4.63, was released in October 1993.
Several ANSI art editors are still actively developed today, including PabloDraw, Moebius, RexPaint and DurDraw.
Many BBS door games employed ANSI graphics and interfaces. Trade Wars 2002, a multiplayer BBS game that remains popular decades after its release in 1990, used ANSI graphics to depict ships, planets, and important locations. It also featured a cinema with short animated ANSI movies. Most of these ANSI graphics were created by Drew Markham[2], who went on to form Xatrix/Gray Matter Interactive and develop Redneck Rampage and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, among other titles.
References
- ↑ Renaud, Josh (28 Dec 2025). "BBSes and the artscene: ANSI art and webcomics, part 2". Break Into Chat. self-published. Retrieved 14 Apr 2026.
- ↑ Martin, Gary (19 Jul 2019). "Gary Martin, creator of 'TradeWars 2002'". Break Into Chat (Interview). Interviewed by Renaud, Josh. self-published. Retrieved 17 Aug 2025.
Bibliography
- Scott, Jason. "BBS: The Documentary" (DVD). Boston, MA: Bovine Ignition Systems, 2005.
- Danet, Brenda. "Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online". Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001. ISBN 1-85973-424-3.
- "Dark Domain: the artpacks.acid.org collection" (DVD-ROM). San Jose, CA, USA: ACiD Productions, LLC, 2004. ISBN 0-9746537-0-5.
- Zetter, Kim. How Humble BBS Begat Wired World. Wired News. June 8, 2005.
See also
External links
- Sixteen Colors ANSI art and ASCII art archive
- Artpacks.org
- Artscene.textfiles.com
- Ansilove - Tools for converting ANSI and ASCII text files into PNG images
- Microsoft table showing code page 437 character set