The 2600 Magazine : “The Hacker Quarterly” has now published a second article on the Bulletin Board Scene. This is an update to our first article, expressing important updates that really matter to The Scene.
Several years back there was a Podcast run by “warmfuzzy” which dealt with textmode computing, particularly the BBS aspect of textmode computing. It was left alone for those several years, but is now going to be continued. This Podcast is known as TexTalk News. It deals with communications technology of the textmode nature, such as BBSes, Packet Radio, Dialup Chats, FAX machines, and other such tech that is transmitted as text. We have interviewed several people on that Podcast, including “calcmandan” and “cr1mson.” It is a news formatted show bringing you the latest and greatest news from The Scene. A link to the Podcast will be posted here when the shows are migrated to phatstar.net. It is our sincere desire that you get quality news about the text-based computer comms scene from this service. We want to keep this service alive and well, this BBS service, that animates us all and brings to remembrance just how lucky we are to have all sorts of great people around us who can make our lives better by our vintage social networking adventures… back in the day when these things were actually rewarding chats and not just tweeting out our passing thoughts or trying to be that person who has their whole life together as shown in pictures and videos. Here we don’t do multi-media, its just text, a wonderful world of communications without the emojis, without the rubbish. Please check back here now and then for this to have its link to TexTalk News’ web page once it is complete. Thank you and best regards! -warmfuzzy
There aren’t many things that I am so excited about as the find of this software. I’m currently working on a book called “Textmode Magazine’s Echomail Networks,” and it has several ANSI graphics converted into PNG files. I used PabloDraw to convert the ANSIs to PNG format and it had some sort of limit of about 1500 pixels across. This software allows you to get a much better result than that. ansilove allows for the upscaling of any ANSI graphics file up to an arbitrarily large size, and you can get results of 10,000 across the screen. In actual fact I haven’t tested if it can go to 30,000 pixels across the screen or not but it sure looks like you can. For my purposes I only need 4250×5500 end result files, as that is the size of an 8.5″ x 11″ page. It does the upscaling perfectly. There is nothing wrong with this software and it does not need a new version released as it does everything you’d like it to do as is. My rating of this software is a spectacular ten out of ten. It is also very easy to install:
sudo apt-get install ansilove
That is all that’s required and you’re good to go. It is a command line utility and works for the major Linux Distros right after install. This “just works.” I will say once more, this software is exceptionally good at doing what it does. This stuff is so cool. I no longer need to rely on the lesser quality conversions experienced with ANSI Design Editor software. The command I use to get this thing done follows:
./ansilove -R 7 ./InputANSI.ans
The ./ means to run a file in the local directory. The -R 7 is a custom scale factor of seven. The ./InputANSI.ans represents the ANSI graphic to convert that is found in the current directory.
Fun times!
w00t!
To download it check out the following:
https://github.com/ansilove/ansilove
https://www.ansilove.org
The PHATstar Society is sponsoring BBS Day and offering prizes to people who sign up for the BBS Day Prize Draw. Warmfuzzy is coordinating the prize draw aspect of the day. There will be several big prizes and several serial numbers for quality anti-virus software as the lesser gifts. It will be a fun day that rewards people who participate in the BBS Scnne. Winners will be selected using pseudo random number generation with the winners selected randomly from the full list of poeple who have signed up for this thing. We will be rewarding winners with about $150 USD worth of computer kit. It will be a good time for all involved. We are giving back to all of those in The Scene with rewards for those who are seriously into this wonderful hobby. Fun times for sure.
Some time about three years ago it was decided that we in the BBS’ing Scene needed our very own day. Everyone else seemed to have their own day, so why not us? I posed the idea to a few friends of mine and they loved the idea. It was decided that the site needed to be BBS server agnostic, that is to say we would have to be inclusive of all the various BBS server software out there and not just favour our own particular favs. There were a few problems: where to get the money to host such a project, who we would include in our project; being inclusive is a good idea but those who are completely out of their minds we’d tend to stay away from as we don’t want to have to deal with that drama. It was decided to make this site using WordPress and the Elementor Framework. This software is the most customisable that we could find and it would fully grant us the custom modding wanted for this site. As for the money part, the PHATstar Society is paying for this project. As for the content we are sourcing out the main players in the BBSing Scene to spread their ideas and knowledge to everyone. We all have our biases, yes even us at BBSDay.org. I’d like to make it very clear that we are proponents of the GNU/Linux operating system, the GPL Version 2 License, and promoting some of our own in-house projects that we think the BBSing community may enjoy to learn about. We hope that you find this informative, bringing new ideas into your minds and have you grow a deep love for computerised bulletin board systems (BBSes).