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Comment by sliptype | Hacker News Reader

I'm really impressed with that pixel art. Anybody know the process for making something like that?

Back in the day I used TheDraw for fine editing. It was a DOS program.

(It's been over 20 years since I last used it, so I don't know where to start other than saying you'll probably need to use DOSBOX to run it.

I also used a graphical program for starting with long ANSIs that basically used the half-character blocks to start with basic pixels, but I don't remember the name. (Basically, the characters that turn 80x25 text into 80x50 pixels.)

There were some cool gif2ansi progs as well at the time. I had forgotten about TheDraw. Back in the days when modem communications were so slow that you could actually read the characters coming across the screen as they were received. It was like watching a really fast typist. Now entire hi resolution videos stream. Watching my dad download his first gif was revolutionary. An actual picture transmitted! I sound like my grandpa now. Ugg.

Right? At 300 baud you could almost read the text as it appeared. Buying a 9600 baud modem after a year or two at 2400 felt amazing, like, "wow, whole lines of text appear before I even start reading!"

Then, with the jump to 14.4k it was like, "wow, a whole PAGE of text practically just pops up!" One whole... screenful of bytes. Wow.

Then you'd start an XMODEM transfer of a single image file and go make dinner.

...and then zmodem came out and saved us all with resumable downloads, because 50% of the time you lost connection due to crappy phone lines/noise and would have to start over.

I found it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_festival_TDRAW500

Regarding software, people use (or at least used to use) an “ANSI Editor”. There are a few to choose from:

http://wiki.synchro.net/resource:ansi_editors

Check PabloDraw [1] or REXpaint [2].

[1] http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/

[2] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

Decent online one here as well: https://asc-paint.glitch.me/

The one I've been keeping an eye on for a few years is https://www.aseprite.org which unfortunately I have not yet needed for anything, but hopefully it helps you.

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