![]() They called these custom terminals by different names: “emulators,” “graphics terminals,” “helpers,” etc. They attempted to do this by creating their own terminal programs. They wanted their games to look and sound as cool as a console game from Nintendo or a PC game from Apogee. Many programmers aspired to make BBS door games that offered more than just text. Since no single standard was universally adopted, game authors couldn’t count on users having compatible terminals. But ANSI music implementations remained proprietary. This “ ANSI music” was very simple - you could play notes at various octaves and tempos. They did this by redefining (some might say breaking) part of the ANSI spec. On the PC, several terminal programs (notably TeleMate, QModem, and BananaCom) came up with their own standards for playing music using ANSI escape sequences. BBS games often incorporated this “bell” sound. Most computer platforms’ character sets included a bell character, such as ASCII code 7, which would trigger the terminal to beep or to ring. This screen recording of a terminal session in SyncTerm captures the ANSI music piece “A bit of Beethoven” by Bob Clarke, featuring artwork by Ebony Eyes.īBS audio was extremely primitive. But ANSI was a very limited medium, and BBS games remained visually inferior to traditional video games. Examples include Atari’s “ ATASCII” character set or Commodore’s “ PETSCII.”īy the 1990s, the PC DOS/Windows platform had become dominant, and most BBSes employed its extended character set and 16-color mode to make “ ANSI art.” Talented artists could use ANSI’s shaded-block and pipe characters to create impressive scrolling screens of text graphics. Many systems also had their own individual extended character sets (“high” ASCII) containing various symbols that could be use for drawing, as well as special terminal codes to enable coloring or animating the text. North American microcomputers of the 1980s offered the standard set of 128 ASCII characters in black-and-white. Most terminals were text-based, so any in-game “graphics” had to be composed of text (letters, numbers, symbols). The borders of the countries are double-pipe PC ANSI characters. The interface is composed entirely of text. ![]() This screen shot shows the Australia continental map in the game Global War by Joel Bergen.
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