IDEA: ASCII graphics engine

[ygfperson]

design a graphical API which works entirely in text mode (like aalib)

[confuted]

now this sounds entertaining. another idea would be to read in a bitmap and convert it to ASCII symbols and display the results as an ASCII picture that looks good...I've seen a program that can do it, but I don't remember the name or link. It was pretty cool, though.

[xds4lx]

I think ive seen one too but man that was so long ago, i think it was at www.flipcode.com as an image of the day, but im too tired to go search through it right now.

[ygfperson]

it does look interesting. i think it might be too tough for the average coder, though. it would require a bitmap of every byte (or at least every byte shown).

conceivably, it could work by matching a section of an image against a byte's bitmap image and using the one which has the most similarities.

[harryP]

I like this idea. As a matter of fact, I've been working on something that's like a DirectDraw but it's for console applications. It allows you to load up "blitmaps" (which are like bitmaps but for the console), display them, create surfaces, draw simple shapes and lines, perform easy animation, and what I find best about it: Sprites! Lol yes I was able to incorporate sprites into it as well. And I figured while I was at it, I'd might as well make console versions of DirectSound and Direct3D, too. I started on the D3D, but that didn't get far, and I'm slowly working on DirectSound. I've yet to figure out how to play wav files; I've been using the internal speaker beeps hahah. So yeah I think this is a good idea.

Brendan

[confuted]

I once saw a program written in QBasic that would play .wav files in DOS...actually, I've seen a bunch of them. If you know QBasic, or if you want to spend about 3 minutes and learn it, you might be able to convert that code to C. I'm not sure...it's been a long time.