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Watch Star Wars Episode IV in ASCII via Terminal
Authored by: babbage on Apr 12, '06 11:19:54AM
>Not the same thing.

The ASCII Quicktime example uses the Quicktime engine to render arbitrary Quicktime visual content (images or video) as plain ASCII text. Basically, it takes a cluster of pixels in the image and selects the ASCII character that best resembles that pattern. It works surprisingly well, but to get good results you should set your terminal fairly wide to leave enough room for it to render.

By contrast, the Star Wars ASCII guy has been hand-converting the original Star Wars movie to a series of ASCII frames, one by one, for several years now -- at least as far back as the late 90s. He is *not* trying to replicate it pixel-for-pixel though. This is more like taking each frame of the movie and making hand-drawn cartoons, then stacking them up to make a flip-book movie that gets the story across in reduced, cartoony format.

If you don't want to run it via telnet, you can see the same animation in a Java applet on his web site, at http://www.asciimation.co.nz/. The guy who turned it into a telnet parlor trick has an article about it all from The Register on his web site, at http://www.blinkenlights.nl/thereg/ . As I say, this has been a work in progress for years now, and at the rate it has been going, it'll probably be another decade before the project is finished. :-)

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