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RIP was a graphics scripting language developed primarily for use on BBSs in the mid 1990s. It's a vector-graphics system, so should be pretty familiar in its functionality to anyone who's worked with SVGs.
Given my proclivity for all things 90s and kinda broken, it should be unsurprising that after discovering it I quickly decided I wanted a good way to look at (and maybe even work with) RIPscrip files. Unfortunately, other than one freeware MS-DOS viewing program, very little seems to be readily available in terms of RIP software.
I started having a chat with Autumn about this and we decided to try and throw together something that would run natively on modern architectures & operating systems that would let us look at RIP images.
Obviously I'm partly interested in doing this because I just find RIPscrip an entertaining artifact of a time in internet history that I enjoy a lot. I'm also partly interested in doing this because I think this is a gap in digital archiving that's worth filling.
Preserving digital culture & materials is of course first about literally preserving data. We need to make efforts to ensure that physical media and the data thereon are maintained. However, we also need to be able to access this information. For now, accessing RIP graphics isn't too hard for the technically-inclined (just spin up DOSbox with a copy of FREEVIEW.EXE), but I think preserving access should go beyond this.
Good archiving access isn't just for the technically literate: it should ideally be as easy as possible for anyone to get and interpret any data they want. A good archive is a lively one that encourages widespread interaction, interpretation, and participation. I hope that, for a small piece of history, I can help to make that access possible.
The brief for this one is pretty simple: write a FOSS parser/viewer for RIPscrip. We're aiming for this to render these images as close to their original form as possible, including animation timings and, if possible, support for the ANSI music output.
After a bit of back and forth, we settled on a Rust/SDL basis for the software. We've started work on a parser using the nom parser library.