What's your favorite pure ANSI game, /vr/?
Hard mode: No roguelikes.
ZZT
pac-man clone
Castle.
To this day. I'm still, at best, 400 points off from a perfect game. I refuse to look up what to do. I wanna figger it out on my own.
Also, I used to like Sam Spade back in le day.
>>2849623
> figger
m8.
>>2849708
let her figger, byte your lips if you have two
>>2849709
No u
>>2849726
Know ewe.
>>2849732
That whould be "yuo". No one ever spelled "you", "ewe"
>>2850090
To get all ANSI (ASCII?) up in here:
IU ^_~
>>2850121
ASCII is a specific character encoding, defines which characters you can use. It says nothing about color, and contains mostly characters suitable for writing. ANSI defines a set of terminal escape sequences to change foreground and background colors. ANSI also uses a bunch of characters outside of the ASCII range (look for code page 437), that are commonly used to draw. For example in OPs pic you can see that the image "pixels" are each half a character tall. That's because they use the ANSI characters ▄ and ▀ with different foreground and background colors.
>>2848134
I enjoyed Code Red and Megazeux and castle enigma so much I wanted to support Janson, and sent her real money for her whole catalog. The megazeux games were really good, and labyrinth of zeux was great too. She had some one or two vga mode puzzle games that were good too. I loved that she used Bells Whistles and Sound boards because I could listen to .s3m music with my pc speaker/Disney sound source I begged a friend to give me.
>>2850132
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NofeQLZCRTk
Mission: Engima rather. Fantastic, my favorite zzt world.
Fuck it's hard to search for zzt shit. zzt.org
Not retro but Bloodlands is pretty cool.
>>2850209
for the record, this image is not ANSI text/graphics. Half of the "tiles" used exist on no codepage, and the colors are outside of the 16 colors normally available. It's more like a bad excuse to do terrible graphics.
>>2850219
https://www.tigsource.com/2012/04/18/bloodlands/
> made in the ANSI-based game creation tool Megazeux
>>2850248
Megazeux allows modifying the character set. ZZT does not. ANSI itself makes no statement either way regarding the character map. It's just concerned with terminal control. Since Megazeux is available for DOS, I suppose it's within the hardware to alter the character set. If it's within the realm of what's usually known as ANSI art, I'll leave up to interpretation.
>>2850278
>I suppose it's within the hardware to alter the character set.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA-compatible_text_mode#Fonts
>Along with several hardware-dependent fonts stored in the adapter’s ROM, the text mode offers 8 loadable fonts
>>2850343
good point, I remember these interfaces. Good times.
>>2850209
>It's more like a bad excuse to do terrible graphics.
You can actually make pretty good-looking stuff in the MZX engine, that's just a shitty example of it.
Megazeux uses textmode VGA. 80x25 characters, 8x14 char width, and a palette of 16 colors out of a possible 262144.
The charset can be modified at runtime, but you're still limited to 256 chars. It's ASCII.
>>2850441
>You can actually make pretty good-looking stuff in the MZX engine, that's just a shitty example of it.
Oh, no question. My point was that quite a few times devs think they can hide their lack of artistic skills behind low level graphics, and it simply doesn't work. It looks shit, because their skill is shit.
>a palette of 16 colors out of a possible 262144
I forgot, is that something the original text modes could do?
>limited to 256 chars. It's ASCII.
Terribly nitpicky, but ASCII is a 7 bit charset, 128 characters (32 of those control characters). The remaining 128 characters are outside of the ASCII range and tend to vary by codepage.
>>2850460
MZX up to 2.51 could run entirely on a 386-40 with a vga card. (ask me how I know)
The palette could be edited pretty finely, but you only ever had 16 colors on screen at once, and only two per character. Normal text mode.
The character map could also be edited while the game ran. You didn't need to have frames of animation for an item to step through, instead the item could change its one character over and over to make animation.
Text mode games in the zzt/megazeux style are pretty hard to do well, imo. You need a lot of thought into your art and how you can get around all these obstacles.
>tfw your zzt game isn't on zzt archive, and you felt you did some really cool things, like having a top down shmup in it.
>>2850576
how do you know?
>>2850576
I also can't find this animated, but this was like a 35 character wide window that was fully animated and had 'autumn dreams' spinning around. It had the whole charset in that space and it was loading new frames of animation by loading new charsets in every frame, so the video had to renedered down to a monochrome bmp. (and was stored that way so video of any length would have been a huge file)
>>2850593
Forgot pic
>>2850590
I had one! lulz. It ran it better than my friend's 486 dx for some reason. Maybe I had a faster hdd.
>>2850576
you raise quite an important point by bringing up VGA. In the CGA/EGA days text mode had quite a bit of an advantage in terms of color count. With VGA though, text mode was more of a nerd thing than anything else, at least for games.
>>2850595
I had a 386 40MHz myself, and yes, it's quite a powerful little beast. The clock speed was deliberately chosen to work well together with the bus(ses). Even if the 486 DX could churn through numbers faster, the bus was quite a weak link
To be honest I never really cared much for Megazeux. It has a lot of advancements over ZZT, but it's still not advanced enough for serious game design.
ZZT's simplicity is its strength. It's like playing with tinker toys; complicated enough to do some really cool stuff with, but still simple enough that a child could do it.
>>2850702
All the best shit in mzx is always a demo because no one can be assed to finish a game.
Story>
I was just trying to remember this (Booshkies demo) and instead looked up 'w' games, and clicked on 'warped demo' ... Which wasn't booshkies, but a guy in the fucking comments said Booshkies, and I was like 'oh, that's it.'
>>2851163
>All the best shit in mzx is always a demo because no one can be assed to finish a game.
Yeah, it seems like most MZX projects are too ambitious for their own good. They always want to do all kinds of crazy stuff with the engine, like physics engines and multi-character RPG battles and stuff, instead of just sticking with the ZZT-style gameplay it's designed for.
Why aren't there any newer action-type ANSI/ASCII games anyway? There's Dwarf Fortress but it's the polar opposite of a game like ZZT or one of those ANSI Boulder Dash clones
