My earliest exposure to digital art was viewing ANSI art on bulletin board systems, a scrolling, text-based experience over a slow dial-up connection. There's something alluring about the simplicity of a limited color palette rendered with 80 character columns of text. The computers back then were restricted to primitive hardware. Graphics cards could only render 256 colors at a time. Sound cards used on-board oscillators to produce a finite number of sound waves. And yet the creative genius of programmers pushed these limitations to magnificent results.
Ansitunes attempts to capture the spirit of that time. Using an elementary cellular automaton as the impetus, ASCII characters based on the code page 437 character set are rendered in VGA colors, and a chiptunes-style music score is generated using synth oscillators and noise algorithms. As the ANSI art scrolls, the music plays the ECA-generated song.
By Craig Phares
