Alchemy

October 28, 2013 1:28 PM

Peter Nitsch ported aa-lib to Flash, allowing easy conversion of images to ASCII art in a browser. The site may take a few moments, without any indication of progress, to load.
posted by frimble (6 comments total)

If anyone checking this out is experiencing this sort of transform for the first time, be advised there's also the potential to do it with video using common playback software like VLC (note that, depending on your platform, you may need an older version in order to rock the ASCII goodness due to some recent support issues).
posted by trackofalljades at 1:42 PM on October 28, 2013

HTML5 image to ascii converter, in color
posted by benzenedream at 2:31 PM on October 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

I ran a live camcorder feed through aalib once. If you were stoned enough and unfocused your eyes you could make our what was going on, sort of. The coolest part was that you could save the text to a file and play it back with cat (embedded control chars let it repaint the terminal window instead of just scrolling).
posted by ryanrs at 2:33 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

ASCIIcam, a view of your webcam in ASCII art. HTML 5, no Flash required. (By Grumdrig, creator of Progress Quest). It's not aa-lib though.

aa-lib is a uniquely good ASCII art convertor in that it does sub-character rendering. Ie the letter P will be used to draw a contour that's dark in 3 corners and light in the lower right.
posted by Nelson at 2:39 PM on October 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

My friend's Mac app, Blinky, does a pretty good job of photo->ascii and webcam->ascii. Not free, but he did put an absurd amount of time into the cathode emulation. I keep meaning to work out if there's a good way to use it to play old Infocom games.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:10 PM on October 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Works like a charm!

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posted by Dr. Send at 11:01 AM on October 29, 2013 [1 favorite]