Younger generations do not know, but back in the days of text based IRC chatting networks people used ASCII arts to add a little color to otherwise boring text chats. There was no way to send or display graphics files, so people resorted to ASCII arts and codes for smileys like 🙂 and :-(. Now that ASCII art has been completely forgotten and nobody uses it anymore, some developers have created a new software called ASCII Animator that is able to convert your GIF animations into ASCII art animations. The effect is purely for the pleasure of your eyes and for a little fun derived from creating the strange looking animations.
ASCII Animator is a lightweight application for Windows and it comes with an installer program. It uses Microsoft .NET 2.0 or later versions, so you will not face any problem running it on Windows Vista and above.
After launching ASCII Animator, you have to select a source GIF animation. It comes with a sample GIF animation of a dancing rabbit. You can also get many such animations from the internet by searching on Google. But you should know that longer and complex animations will take a longer time to be converted. You also have to select an output folder where the ASCII animations shall be copied.
In the settings for the ASCII Animator, you can choose the font used, font size and the number of characters per 100 pixels of the original GIF animation. The more character you use, the longer it will take to create the animation. You also have three options for the output animation files – HTML animations, gray scale GIF animation or colored GIF animation. The HTML animation takes only a few seconds to generate, while the GIF ASCII animations can take many minutes.
After you click on the Convert button in the ASCII Animator window, it will start the conversion process. Based on the size of the original GIF animation and the output settings, it may take a shorter or longer duration for the output animation file to be generated. The following snapshot shows a still frame from both the original and ASCII animations:
Conclusion: The ASCII Animator is a fun application that can create ASCII art animations from existing GIF animation images. It can create both the HTML based animations as well as the good old GIF animations.
You can download ASCII Animator from http://www.qqpr.com/.