Sixteen Colors is an online archive for ANSI and ASCII artpacks. The artform was originally intended for display on computer textmode consoles. It gained popularity in the early nineties with the rise of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
At one point artists started to group together and release their work in collections released monthly, these collection are called artpacks. Rivalry resulted in fierce competition between these artgroups which only boosted activity. ACiD and iCE are examples of early prominent groups.
The rise of the Internet in the late nineties started the decline of BBS's and thus also the need and interest for ANSI/ASCII art. And although the need has almost vanished, still today artists are producing artpacks in collectives. Sixteen Colors aims to collect these artpacks as an archive in the public interest.
A Canadian ANSI art group that's been releasing art for thirty years and counting.
If you're not MS-DOS ANSI enabled, they even have an online gallery of the work in each art pack, lovingly rendered as conventional (animated) image files.
The world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles - preserving raster typography from pre-GUI times. Includes 8-bit and 16-bit fonts as well, including Atari, Tandy, and even some BIOS' characteristic typefaces.
TrueType (.ttf), bitmap (.fon) and web (.woff) remakes for 200+ character sets. Both pixel-perfect and aspect-corrected reproductions of the original raster fonts. Multi-lingual Unicode enhancements of selected system character sets. Free to use under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
A text-mode art editor inspired by MS Paint. It is itself a text-mode application, no desktop environment required. Can edit ANSI graphics, plain text, some SVG files, HTML, and other file formats.
Install this script and VIM will be able to properly display ANSI escape sequences for color.
Installing
vim AnsiEsc.vba.gz:so %:q
Using:
:AnsiEsc
A terminal-based webcam viewer. Video streams are displayed as ASCII (default) or ANSI graphics.
A collection of text art and photographs with an 8-bit aesthetic.
A fairly modern FOSS BBS software package for Linux. Written in C++. Prefers text-based files over binary ones. Has all of the features you'd expect of an old-school BBS, even ANSI art. Embedded python interpreter for scripting and extensions. In sunset mode, though, they've moved on to a new codebase.