MIST0426/CT-RC

 Mistigram: trotting an old joke around the track once again, in last month's new books-themed MIST0426 artpack collection Cthulu made a batch file DOSbox adaptation of George Nachman's #RichardCory Interactive Adventure from 1998, a joke about #EdwinArlingtonRobinson's 1897 poem from over a hundred years earlier. This is its splash screen, with its weird Braille-like low-#ASCIIart logo to accommodate the dictates of the MS-DOS command line. You can play it via https://16colo.rs/pack/mist0426/CT-RC.BAT or see the original at https://www.llamas.org/corey.html

MIST1121/ML-LAZY_GAME_REVIEWS-1984_BBS

 Mistigram: this #ANSIart tribute to Clint Basinger's #LazyGameReviews, as depicted on an early #IBMPC, was drawn by MeaTLoTioN of thE qUAntUm wOrmhOlE BBS and included in the new MIST1121 artpack collection.

ADVENT23/source

Mistigram: just to remind, we just dropped ADVENT23, an #MSDOS program (here's a taste of its source code!) by Andy "Moebius" Herbert acting as an #ANSIart #AdventCalendar: every day (up to Dec 25) it unlocks a new 25-line ANSI screen for your viewing pleasure, viewable through a web browser via https://16colo.rs/pack/advent23/ADVENT.EXE or http://andyh.org/advent23/

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Some artists we only have an excuse to discuss once a year, in the wake of their making an annual appearance, like Punxsutawney Phil, in an artpack… then retreating back into obscurity. Others have a stable of projects they grind away on over the year, churning out projects and milestones on a regular basis like miniature computer art factories.

So, here we have VileR, who has featured in these pages before. Being a connoisseur of vintage technology, he recognized that a very significant milestone was coming up on the calendar – the 35th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC, the contender that elevated home computing beyond the hobbyist miasma of the late ‘70s when the market was caught in three-way gridlock between the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and Tandy’s TRS-80.

Something important was folded in to the release of the IBC PC. In PC-DOS, one of its three options of included operating systems (supposing you eschewed CPM-86 or UCSD D-PASCAL), it included a BASIC language interpreter with some sample programs. There was a company specialising in home implementations of BASIC in those days: Microsoft. One of the sample programs included was a little driving game called DONKEY.BAS, written by a nobody named William Gates III. It could be characterised as … crude but effective. It boasted functional graphics, but let’s be fair here: what it really needed were textmode graphics. (I’m not sure that its graphics aren’t simply remapped text characters, but let’s not split hairs here.)(VileR responds: “I can say that Donkey’s original graphics aren’t remapped text chars after all… but that *does* touch on another idea I had…”)

VileR saw what needed to be done to mark this occasion: clone the historic (yet largely unknown) game, in the textmode it always so richly deserved, as a PC Booter (the delivery mechanism of nearly all original PC games), re-implemented in 512 bytes. And here you have it. All in a day’s work! Hats off to VileR and his Sorry Ass!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Here it is, the culmination of our multimedia Christmas presentations: sounds and sights to beggar the imagination.  Well, ASCIIs and ANSIs, poems and meet reviews, high resolution works and all set to the strains of tracker music.  December 1997, this marked a rare demonstration of Sylphid’s MAGnum engine for generating e-mags (electronic magazines).

There are lots of little details at the video description over at YouTube including a full credits roll; some of the highlights include a Christmificated menu set for the DoDEL BBS and a surprise soundtrack switch when we begin displaying artwork by Silent Knight.

Not every part of the program was 100% functional run through DOSBox in 2014, so a few poems which failed to load were magically inserted back into the video, scrolling by at a much happier 14.4k baud.  Also a pair of monochrome logos from the pack’s FILE_ID.DIZ and infofile were tacked on as bookends, because the whole darned presentation was in a seasonal mode.

That just about concludes our look back at Mistigris’ Christmases past.  The well has run dry!  If we want to show you any new Christmassy computer art, we’re going to have to make more.  Hope it helped to give you an oldschool Christmas for 2014!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l29i4vQx__A?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Christmas 2014 is nearly here!  We won’t be able to mine the past for holiday material indefinitely, so we’re hauling as much out of the stacks and middens for your inspection and enjoyment as we can now: the remastered re-release of The Bells of Yule, Cthulu’s 2001 ASCII Art Christmas card… Yesterday you got to see & enjoy our Christmas 1994 intro and some supplementary seasonal ANSIs and lits, and today we magically skip forward a whole year, sharing the greatly-expanded Christmas 1995 intro released (belatedly) as DCXMAS95.ZIP in the MIST0196.ZIP artpack.

As before, this one was spearheaded by Dr. CPU, and now includes a straightfoward programmed “snowfall” effect as well as several ANSIs and a strange piece of high-resolution artwork… all to the splendidly strange seasonal sounds of Sentience, who was at this time releasing music as part of EuphoniX – lightly skipping over the complicated occasion of Christmas, he instead opts for the traditional tune “Old Lang Syne” as written by Scottish poet Robbie Burns… but in a super ‘90s electronic arrangement.  (He is also responsible for the “Mist” logo on the bottom right of that scary Santa skull.  Amiga users, they were all polymaths.)

Full credits in the YouTube video description!  Merry Christ'mist!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ8wNA8_Rc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

20 years ago, it was just another month on BBSes, and underground computer artists continued along in their low-resolution hobby same as they ever did, minting blocky logos for BBSes and waiting for busy signals to resolve into symphonies of modem handshakes.  But December being what it is, and us being a bunch of kids, the occasion of Christmas was looming large in our collective subconscious.  So here’s what you get:

Resident coder Dr. CPU drew on some sound libraries and logos (and, all right, did some programming of his own as well 8) to put together a joint “intro”, an executable MS-DOS program that displayed scrolling pictures and text while playing music, acting as a multimedia Christmas card from the members of Mistigris and our fellow travellers in would-be 604 demogroup Sonic Equinox.  It was released in our third artpack, MIST1294.ZIP.

But that’s not all the Christmas content that was to be found in that pack, so as a bonus, I’ve presented our two grand Christmas ANSI and lit (or poetry) “collies” – compilations glommed together into a single large file – scrolling by at a respectable period speed of 2400 baud… to the sweet strains of the first part of the Bells of Yule, which appeared in that artpack as a preview of sorts to the music disk we released later that month featuring all five parts, which was subsequently lost for 16 years and just this week re-issued in a remastered form.

(Full credits in the description of the video over at YouTube!)

We released another Christmas intro the following year, but … one post at a time!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)