Today’s Mistigram item from MIST1116 was selected as the 16 Colours ANSI of the Day on November 27th (the second time that month the sporadic artist had been so honoured!) but I wanted to wait until I had the chance to share the souped-up version I’d tried cobbling together for the MIST1116 trailer video (before ultimately rejecting it as not thematically fitting in).
Well, here it is! VileR, in association with his fellow archivists at The Dos Collection, was celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of the IBM PC computer, the best way he knew how: by making reference to the BASIC game by Bill Gates that shipped with the machine’s PC-DOS operating system (running under its BASICA interpreter), DONKEY.BAS. This is not the first time this year VileR released a masterpiece involving DONKEY.BAS – a few months ago, as you may recall, he re-implemented it in textmode as “Sorry Ass”, boiling it down so concisely it fit in a floppy diskette’s boot sector.
I was hoping to better ANSImate the car blasting through the BASICA start screen (Did You Know: double-arrow characters used on the BASICA screen are ANSI control characters, so attempts to depict them accurately will result in glitched display output. I sure found out, repeatedly!), but my window of opportunity to soup up this file’s presentation coincided exactly with me losing access to my main computer and the opportunity passed me by. Alas! Maybe for the PC’s 40th I can take another crack at it. Hats off, VileR!
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!
Not long after Mistigris’ first big slumber around the turn of the century, I wrote my friend Suzie (hi, Suzie! You are, er, totally not reading this blog) about incidents through my adolescence growing up in Vancouver where my story intertwined with those of 604-local Neuromancer author (and cyberspace visionary) William Gibson (… a correspondence I really ought to reproduce here someday, as somewhat relevant to computer art in the 604. But I digress.) The e-mail client glitched up and, brain fresh with the aftershock of a well written e-mail that failed to launch, I re-wrote the whole thing from memory – beat for beat, fact for fact, joke for joke… it would have been impossible to reproduce the message exactly, but in terms of semantic content the second draft was congruent to the first, and both being written in my voice, the apple was only ever going to fall so far from the tree. Unbeknownst to me, the first e-mail sent, so Suzie wrote back reporting how she got to enjoy the peculiar experience of reading the same thing, twice, two different ways. In short, given identical tasks in the same contexts, we may reasonably conclude that a given brain will approach them identically.
This must be why the only work of textmode art from our MIST1015 collection to be featured in the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day back on November 22nd… was just featured again on April 16th, this time under the texty auspices of Blocktronics. The same brain surveyed the same pack as before and the one work that jumped out at the same pair of eyes was, unsurprisingly, the same piece as before.
Just as well! It’s an exceptional piece, it warrants celebration outside of the scrum kudos of the previous post, and due to ongoing disruptions with 16 Colours, this time it’s touted before fans of Blocktronics – the most sophisticated textmode art enthusiasts on the planet!
There were other textmode pieces in that collection deserving of some spotlight (especially the videos – they rightfully touted Whazzit’s “Dead Man’s Pants”, but that was only one of three!), but I can’t argue that this one’s appeal is very immediate and obvious. I enjoy every part of it – the green seaweed on top, the floppy disks in the “total” font, the groovy textures in the “DOS”, the shaded IBM PC typeface for “collection”… nothing is more iconic of MS-DOS gaming than a cacodaemon from Doom (neatly cropped from the front cover of the “Manual of the Planes” AD&D sourcebook), the crunching of the cartoonish TDC letters is apt, “release” is radically written… and I don’t even mind that the purple swirlies at the bottom are just the green ones of the top, inverted.
The AOTD authorities adopted a canonical position of bafflement as to what “the Total DOS Collection” might be, but if I had to speculate, I’d imagine that it hearkens to the roots of the underground computer art scene (and the demoscene before it) and would be some kind of encyclopediac platform-complete compilation for purposes of “curation and preservation”.
People have all kinds of reasons for wanting to maintain their privacy, and so I don’t have that much more to tell you about the celebrated artist VileR here – but here’s what I’ve been able to glean: He’s the only computer artist I’ve been able to lure out of the background through my long association documenting games of the gloriously obscure over at MobyGames, the video & computer game database founded by onetime Hornet archive FTP maintainer (and notorious artscene antagonist – keep your warez-scene-tainted ANSI art away from our totally-not-directly-descended-from-game-cracking demoscene works, it’s attracting heat from the feds!) Trixter… and the two of them have worked together as part of a team, most notably on the latest of the retro-demos written for the original IBM PC (with PC Speaker sound and CGA graphics card), the gob-smacking 8088 MPH.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y&w=560&h=315]
He maintains a fascinating blog of the same name where he explains tricks and and tips pursues mysteries of ancient lore pertaining to early home computers, including his recent Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack project (as billed). Also he has some textmode works waiting in the eaves using the Macrocom “ANSI from hell” technique (including another amazing cacodaemon) which will someday blow you all away … once they are made public.
In the meantime, we wait. Impatiently.
(Speaking of waiting impatiently, stay tuned for the annoucement of our call for submissions for MISt1016! This… is only the announcement of the announcement.)
