Star Wars Asciimation (2015)

Author: delvin0

Score: 44

Comments: 29

Date: 2020-10-30 14:01:32

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dzdt wrote at 2020-10-30 17:29:38:

At one point this animation was the oldest surviving file on bittorrent. I remember a Hacker News item pointing that out a few years ago.

Edit. Nope I remember wrong. It was an ASCII rendition of The Matrix that was the oldest on bittorrent.

https://torrentfreak.com/oldest-torrent-is-still-being-share...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102578

sidpatil wrote at 2020-10-30 14:05:23:

Also available via Telnet at towel.blinkenlights.nl.

BuildTheRobots wrote at 2020-10-30 18:35:38:

FYI, if you connect via IPv6 then you can watch in colour :)

dr_orpheus wrote at 2020-10-30 17:37:44:

Ah, reminds me of messing with my friends by piping the output to a write message on their terminals. Super annoying because it just scrolls through the terminal frame by frame.

jolmg wrote at 2020-10-30 16:01:28:

Pity ^S/^Q don't work for pause/play. ^C/^Z also don't seem to work for quitting. I wonder what's preventing these keybindings from working. Very cool regardless.

Joker_vD wrote at 2020-10-30 17:10:40:

The fact that Telnet is actually a protocol, and a weird one (mostly because it's ancient and actually predates UNIX). I believe the reason is that those keypresses are not interpreted by your terminal but instead sent over to the other side to be interpreted there. Obviously, they don't do anything there.

With "nc towel.blinkenlights.nl 23", on the other hand, they would work.

yurishimo wrote at 2020-10-30 17:05:06:

This is way older than 2015. I remember passing around a .bat file with it embedded in High School. 2009 era. At that point it was already old.

darrelld wrote at 2020-10-30 17:29:59:

Older still...I remember there was a telnet server circa 2002 that you could log into and watch it all.

jacobush wrote at 2020-10-30 18:06:40:

In the 90s.

snarfy wrote at 2020-10-30 17:00:31:

There should be a lucas 'digitally enhanced' version, with hi res svg overlays floating around.

dvdkhlng wrote at 2020-10-30 16:39:56:

In Firefox (v82) the text-field does not seem to render in a strictly non-proportional font. Thus everything is garbled. Unfortunately w3m text-mode browser isn't capable to display the page...

[EDIT] The following steps fix playback in Firefox for me:

- I press F12 to open the web-developer tools,

- select the "Console" Tab

- at the prompt at the bottom (marked by ">>") enter:

document.querySelector("pre#screen").setAttribute("style", "font-family:Monospace;")

- press Return. Renders correctly now.

tom_mellior wrote at 2020-10-30 16:56:03:

For me (Firefox 82 on Ubuntu) everything works fine out of the box. #screen has "font-family: Courier New,Fixed;" set.

dvdkhlng wrote at 2020-10-30 17:50:45:

I'm running Firefox, installed from upstream, running on Devuan Beowulf. With the default "Courier New,Fixed" font family set it's just not working.

BerislavLopac wrote at 2020-10-30 20:15:21:

If I'm not mistaken, Courier New is one of Microsoft fonts; if you're on Linux there is an installer available for various distros; on apt-based systems it's:

      sudo apt install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

m-i-l wrote at 2020-10-30 17:14:44:

You can watch any film in ASCII with VLC and a video file[0]:

vlc videofile.mp4 -V aa

[0]

https://wiki.videolan.org/Video_Output/

estebank wrote at 2020-10-30 17:49:38:

I hope it is clear that this _is not_ what the original link is about. VLC can output ascii art like what aalib and libcaca can produce (namely try to simulate images using terminal output), while the submission is an animated scene by scene _recreation_ of A New Hope using ascii art.

shmerl wrote at 2020-10-30 17:15:13:

I remember seeing it at:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

SaltyBackendGuy wrote at 2020-10-30 17:58:40:

This was getting passed around at work. I remember my co-worker saying.

"Looks trustworthy, what could go wrong?". I laughed, and then was amazed at the result.

elvis70 wrote at 2020-10-30 16:06:56:

I couldn't find the original file. It was possible to play the movie with Notepad, by letting your finger press the "Page Down" or "Down" key.

mnw21cam wrote at 2020-10-30 16:46:51:

Asciimation may take some time to load...

It's been sitting there like that for 10 minutes or so. How long does this thing take?

tom_mellior wrote at 2020-10-30 16:56:47:

As long as it takes you to activate JavaScript, I believe.

mnw21cam wrote at 2020-10-30 17:05:20:

So, NaN time then...

KingFelix wrote at 2020-10-30 16:22:46:

Super cool, his/her other projects are pretty rad too

GauntletWizard wrote at 2020-10-30 22:27:51:

Other good examples of this style:

http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/

and

http://www.textfiles.com/art/

To play the former, you’ll want to limit the rate that your terminal displays the text. I use `pv`, or “Pipe Viewer”, as such:

clear && curl -s http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/bambi.vt | pv -q -L 2600

jiveturkey wrote at 2020-10-30 15:53:17:

needs a 1995 tag ... or however old it is

jolmg wrote at 2020-10-30 16:06:23:

Apparently 1999, but it was a Java applet at the time.

jacobush wrote at 2020-10-30 17:09:56:

The java applet was just a telnet client in Java, IIRC. The original was a telnet server.

jolmg wrote at 2020-10-30 21:55:51:

> The original was a telnet server.

The telnet server says:

> Original Work : Simon Jansen (

http://www.asciimation.co.nz/

)

> Telnetification : Sten Spans ( sten@blinkenlights.nl )

> Terminal Tricks : Mike Edwards (pf-asciimation@mirkwood.net)

toast0 wrote at 2020-10-30 17:40:08:

IIRC, that java was self-contained. I think the applet zip file contained the textfile, which I used to make my own local viewer. FWIW, the text file has changed over time (which I guess is fair, it's not like Lucas hasn't changed his versions over time)

gswdh wrote at 2020-10-30 15:40:16:

It boggles my mind why someone would spend so much time on something so pointless... If it makes you happy I guess!