For the ascii art artists: AsciiPaint

Franky666 · Post by **Franky666** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 4:32 pm

I did rewrite my ascii-art application, which is named "AsciiPaint", because the older version was written for win 1.0x and does not work on modern systems. This version has a little bit old school style but I kept the look because I hate the standard skin from windows.

You can do some ascii art works with it. It is a very small but nice tool.

For who doesn't know, what ascii art is all about:
An ascii art is a picture, which consist of characters from the ascii table. It may be a simple smiley or a complex picture. The difficulty is, that you kust can use characters.

This kind of art was popular in times, where ms dos was the actual os.

Most of ascii art artists use a simple text editor like notepad.exe, where all characters have the same width.

AsciiPaint is a special editor, which allows to draw ascii arts with the mouse like in paint.exe. You can export the final image as a .txt file or as .htm file.

Personally, I missuse it for my level maps.

How to use:
To draw any characters to the white paper:
Push the key of the character you want to draw to make it to the actual one. Then click to the white paper. You canalso type from the keyboard, if you point with the mouse to a place and push the return key.

The right mouse button works like a color pick in other drawing applications.

There are some tools to draw circles, boxes or lines. You can fill out areas. The cut, copy and paste funktions are supported. You can paste phrases or ascii arts you find in the internet into the application to edit them.

The editor supports b/w and colorized ascii art up to 1024x1024. You can convert between them.

On the toolbar you will find a color palette and a color pick.
warning! If you save it as a .txt file, these color information will be lost!

Currently, there is no way to use the native .aa2 format until nearly all bugs are fixed. Then I publish codes to use it. At the moment, I may change the format style, because it needs too much space on hdd.

Ascii art pictures can be exported as bitmap file like you see it in the application.

Please post every bug you can find in the application below this post.

actual version:
http://www.file-upload.net/download-687 ... 4.exe.html

older versions:
http://www.file-upload.net/download-686 ... 3.exe.html
http://web56.login-1.loginserver.ch/mir ... a1.1.3.exe
http://web56.login-1.loginserver.ch/mir ... a1.1.1.exe

bugfix log:

Added: application Icon
Fixed: missing Shortcuts
Fixed: Displaying problem in some cases
Fixed: Forgot to free some allocated memory
Fixed: memory overflow
Fixed: Bad GUI on Win ME
Fixed: Tastaturbug: The backspace key destroyed some picture data
Fixed: May crash by loading txt files greater than 1024x1024
changed: smaller html files

I hope, you can read this text, because I'm german and I don't have got a good english language.

Mistrel · Post by **Mistrel** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 9:28 pm

Pictures, please!

Franky666 · Post by **Franky666** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 10:10 pm

Here is a picture from the main window in action:

It is a very large image. I don't know how I can show a tumbnail, which can be clicked to view it in full size

I did some quick ascii art in the middle of the window. On the lower end from the window are the controls. On lower right corner you will find some tooltips.

Trond · Post by **Trond** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 10:29 pm

Hmm. All it does is show a grey window and use 100% cpu.

Franky666 · Post by **Franky666** » Sun Feb 24, 2008 11:10 pm

Oh no!

What Windows are you using?
Did you install DX 7.1 or greater? (I'm sure, you did so, but sometimes...)

The GUI works with OpenWindowedScreen(). There are just some variable declarations before opening.

It may be, because I use an older PB (3.3). I don't have enough money to buy a new one. It is a boxed version, which is from a supermarket and these versiones don't have update accesses

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 12:29 am

It works fine at this XP Machine, haven't tested on vista yet.
Cool

Rook Zimbabwe · Post by **Rook Zimbabwe** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:40 am

I think I used the older version in DOS with QB... made several incredible user interfaces with it... then got hooked into VB1.0 for DOS and never really returned to QB4.5

Mistrel · Post by **Mistrel** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:58 am

That's awsome. Best. Screenshot. Ever!

BriceManuel · Post by **BriceManuel** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 5:09 am

Nice looking app!

Rook Zimbabwe wrote:I think I used the older version in DOS with QB... made several incredible user interfaces with it...

That sounds like ASCII Paint made by my old buddy Brad Withers (Spungulas Software).

Franky666 · Post by **Franky666** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 8:11 pm

Does it run on Vista? I can't test it because I don't have vista

@Rook Zimbabwe:
I also made a version in QB, that runs under DOS. I named it "AsciiArtX". I just used it for "graphical" user interfaces for the standard 80x25 text screen mode

. Few years ago, I worked with QB until I discovered PB.

As I was 12 years old, I made an "OS" named "WichtelchenOS" with QB (very very slow thing on a 386 machine but had a switch that made multitasking with DOS applications, but all currently inactual applications was stopped.), that ran under DOS like earlier windows versions. I developed it because my first PC didn't run Windows. It is saved on 11 diskettes. It doesn't run on modern PCs. Sometimes, I look to the screenshots and remember this good time of QB. I made the whole GUI of the earlier versions of this os in the simple ascii editor. Later versions had a better GUI. All these versions will break in DosBox because of the many asm routines.