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Star Wars Prequels Media Movies

Star Wars, in stunning ASCII-mation 107

Posted by Hemos from the mommy-i'm-scared dept.
id_entity writes "For those of us not lucky enough to see the Phantom Menace this weekend, view the first Star Wars in ASCII-mation. It was created by Simon Jansen, a talented man with lots of time on his hands, and includes almost 10,000 ASCII frames of animation. " Someone needs a new hobby. I mean it.
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Star Wars, in stunning ASCII-mation More

Star Wars, in stunning ASCII-mation

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  • Has anyone tried if the open-jni that was just added to mozilla works? it'd be nice to load that thing in kaffe....
  • at least someone else out there watches Red Dwarf. (Which is the pentultimate science fiction show. damn star wars. :P )

  • Amazing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is one of the most amazing things that
    I have ever seen! I was awed by the fanaticism
    which must have went into creating it. Some
    might find it sad that this fellow put soo much
    effort into such an endevour but I think that
    its good. Nobody got hurt, he must have enjoyed
    himself and I think a lot of people will get
    some enjoyment out of his work. I know my
    sons and I did. BTW I couldn't view it in
    Netscape but the JDK Appletviewer and HotJava 3.0 (which does work under Linux) both display it nicely.

  • Wow! (Score:1)

    by meni ( 2409 )
    The person that created this has WAY too much time on his hands.
  • iCab uses the Apple MRJ for java, and had no problem showing the film, other than the minor jumpiness somebody was mentioning. No workaround necessary :)
  • Easternmost it may be, by some definition ... but the international date line keeps all of Alaska on this side, so it ends up being the westernmost (for time purposes).
  • can this get any funnier?

    Yes.

  • "This is the coolest thing I have ever seen..."
  • Does anybody know if this man has a job?
    If he has I would like to get the same...
  • "I am very sorry to inform people that due to other commitments I have had to remove my Star Wars Asciimation site."

    ???

    -Tom
  • This is probably something laying around from the old bbs days. I remember all sorts of ANSI animated garbage and such on the BBSes. He has probably had this sitting around on his hard drive for 10 years or so waiting for its day...

  • We all know that that Alaska is easternmost state in the union and I guess if there were any theaters out there they could have shown the movie almost a day earlier.

  • "Applet SwPlay can't start: class SwPlay got a security violation: method verification error". Awesome. ;)

    (For the Java whizzes out there: Nutscrape Canonicator 4.5 on MacOS 8.5. Diagnose this!)
  • Help!
    I love the Princess's hair. And Luke's eyes
    after he gets wacked by the sand people.
  • hehe.. great, but how can you exit once it starts playing?
  • Posted by O-:

    It does say alot for the man's dedication...that or he has a never ending supply of beer, and does this from a lap top sitting on the can all day...
  • see sja-play.el [mit.edu] for an elisp player. i call it "sja" for "simon jansen asciimation". this file is part of project ADHOC [mit.edu], under GNU GPL.

  • The applet that JAVA was invented for (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 1999 @04:58AM (#1883433)
    This HAS to be the coolest piece of JAVA
    ever written.

  • Hobby (Score:1)

    by suprax ( 2463 )
    Someone DOES need a new hobby, but that does require some talent.
  • for supreme waste of bandwidh. :)
  • Well, I am using MacOS 8.6 and I wasn't surprised to see the applet crash when I tried to load it into NS 4.5. Unless you have the Java Plug-in (and the page specifies use of it), you are stuck using the NS JVM, which is rather out-of-date. Although I rarely use IE, it is my preferred browser for viewing Java, as you can select the Apple MRJ in the preferences. The Apple MRJ (so long as you get the latest version from Apple) is the most up to date VM available for the Mac AFAIK.

    It sucks, but we're used to work arounds on a Mac, aren't we?

    YS
  • 'way too much time on his hands'

    This guy is my hero too, WOW is right!!!

    My friends use that expression for everything I do that is not invovled with drinking and watching sports on TV. I try to be understanding of THEM...but here on Slashdot it really bugs me!

    Filter...

  • Now you did it... (Score:3)

    by slambo ( 10757 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @03:56AM (#1883440) Homepage
    You've gone and posted something that will make me pull out my SW tapes and watch them again. Geez! And I was just getting over that!
  • This version causes the delay for each frame to be set correctly. This will help any of you that were having problems with the text just flashing by during certain scenes:

    perl -pe 'if(/^(\d+)\s*$/){select undef,undef,undef,$old/15;$old=$1;$_="\e[H\e[J"}' sw1.txt

    (Note: this version isn't completely correct either. It assumes a value of 0 for the first frame, but in this case it doesn't matter since that frame is blank.)
    ---
  • Yes. It would be nice if Rob or Hemos could add the ability to do
    --
    Get your fresh, hot kernels right here [kernel.org]!
    World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!
  • yea, you want to do it?
  • the next thing that it needs is to play the theme music using the system bell.
  • Posted by Art Pepper:

    Navigator 4.5, Debian 2.1

    10,000 frames! Must be nice to not have to work.
  • I dunno about all of those, but as for the sistine chapel -- his jailers : )
  • Ascii? Bah... Check out the FIGURES WARS

    http://members.xoom.com/sqrpshr/

    OK OK.. That ascii has the whole movie and IS cool. Hell I can watch it at work.
  • Where does this person get all his time from? I mean, I hardly have the time to watch The Simpsons every day! Anyway, it's a really nice idea. We're lucky it wasn't mine since then it would never get added to...
  • This guy has a future ahead of him at ILM or Digital Domain!

    The FX BLOWS away the Phantom Menace!

    I'm still shaking....can't wait to see the ASCII version of Empire now!

  • if you thought that was neat (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    check out his link page to evan's star wars cinema. its at http://www.jedinet.com/cinema . Watch the realaudio movies. Its made on a mac with star wars actions figures and a great soundtrack. I was very impressed.

  • Re:Yeah, it's cool and all....Absolutely (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What would drive a man to do this?
    What would drive a man to create his own os?
    What would drive a man to paint the sistine chapel ceiling?
    What would drive a man to cross the atlantic in a single seater airplane.

    The world is a little better place because of people like him.

    Keep up the good work.
  • this is just un-smegging-believable! this is PURE genius!

  • Java under netscape in stock Redhat 6 (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 1999 @05:08AM (#1883457)
    I had the problem with netscape crashing. It seems you need to load *all* the font RPMs.

    rpm -i XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-Type1-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
    rpm -i XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
    rpm -i chkfontpath-1.4.1-1.i386.rpm
    rpm -i ghostscript-fonts-5.10-3.noarch.rpm
    [

    hope this helps
  • Ditto the error on a Solaris box. I've tried various versions of Netscape but to no avail. Could be something to do with the firewall?

    Anyone got a solution?
  • Yeeesh. And I thought I was slick when I whipped up some ASCII for my pine .signature.

    Quux26
  • Without doubt, this is the coolest piece of Perl the world has ever seen.

  • Re:Yeah, it's cool and all.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, sure ... run some this through some that ... he'd fun for sure. It was the first time I switched on Java without regretting it. Cool stuff, no plastics.
  • We all know that that Alaska is easternmost state in the union

    By latitude, maybe; by the international dateline and Alaskan politics, no.

    and I guess if there were any theaters out there they could have shown the movie almost a day earlier.

    I was born and raised in Nome, Alaska and we would have gotten the movie last (if we had a movie theater, that is). When I was a kid, the state legislature voted to put Alaska all on one time zone (GMT -9); it's been this way for at least a decade.

    This World Time Zone Map [navy.mil] shows it. in case you don't take my word for it.

    Actually, looking at the map, we would have beaten out Hawaii (which is GMT -10).

    Jay (=
  • This is COOL. I mean it. I mean, really cool. Unbelieveable. Really unbelieveable.

    I wonder how long movies we can NOW put on DVDs. =)

  • Linux terminal viewer (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 1999 @09:45AM (#1883469)
    Although at least one other person is working on an alternate viewer for the movie, i just thought I'd add my $0.02 with this quick C hack. No fast forward support here, sorry..

    Looks much cooler than in Netscape. And you can
    have it full screen ;-).


    - Copy the text below into a file, say "player.c"
    - Then compile it with "gcc player.c -o player"
    - Next download the jar archive containing the movie from:
    http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lucas/339/sw play.jar

    - Unzip the jar archive with "unzip swplay.jar"
    - Move the sw1.txt file from the data/ dir to the same place as the player
    program you just compiled.
    - Run "player", and enjoy.


    -- copy the text below into player.c --

    #include
    #include
    #include

    #define BASIC_DELAY_TIME ( 1000000L / 15L )
    #define LINES_PER_FRAME 13

    int main ( void )
    {
    FILE * fd ;
    int I , end = 0 ;
    long delayTime ;
    char delayTimeString [ 130 ] ;
    char oneLine [ 130 ] ;


    fd = fopen ( "sw1.txt" , "rt" ) ;
    if ( fd == NULL ) {
    printf ( "Error! Couldn't read sw1.txt\n" ) ;
    return ;
    }
    while (( ! feof ( fd ) ) && ( ! end )) {
    if ( fgets ( delayTimeString , 128 , fd ) != NULL ) {
    delayTime = atol ( delayTimeString ) * BASIC_DELAY_TIME
    ;
    if ( delayTime = 0 ) {

    end = 1 ;
    printf ( "Bad delay time error\n" ) ;
    } else {
    printf ( "\x1b[2J\n" ) ;
    for ( I = 0 ; I if ( fgets ( oneLine , 128 , fd ) == NUL
    L ) {
    end = 1 ;
    break ;
    } else {
    printf ( "%s" , oneLine ) ;
    }
    }
    usleep ( delayTime ) ;
    }
    } else {
    end = 1 ;
    }
    }
    fclose ( fd ) ;
    return ( 1 ) ;
    }



  • Yes. It would be nice if Rob or Hemos could add the ability to do < and >
    --
    Get your fresh, hot kernels right here [kernel.org]!
    World domination: coming soon to a computer near you!
  • Yeah, mine doesn't crash, but it doesn't work right.

    I first saw this yesterday and viewed it in nav 4.5 running on my win 95 (ugh) desktop at work. It was pretty funny.

    Then when I got home I tried to load it up to show it to my wife on nav 4.6 running under Linux. It didn't explode but it was all skewed and jumpy. Very dissapointing.

    Netscape, get your act together, please.

  • Fixing Java in Netscape on RH 6.0 (Score:4)

    by pridkett ( 2666 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @07:39AM (#1883474) Homepage Journal
    Okay, seeing as people were complaining about this, here is how you fix it. True you can install a bunch of RPMs that you probably don't need, or you can look at this page [redhat.com] in RedHat's knowledge base.

    Here is a summary, type the following as root:

    /usr/sbin/chkfontpath --add /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi

    hope this helps. Thats a pretty cool java applet I gotta admit. Also for some of you who are having problems, it might be because of an old version of netscape (or IE I suppose) that doesn't yet support Java 1.1 applets. In that case you gotta waste some bandwidth downloading a newer version.

  • Yep, I'm sorry to say, but there were a number of bugs that were in the orignal code posted. Because I had nothing to do this morning before I went off to see starwars, I fixed it up and got it working. So, here it is, the new and improved version: (same install instructions as noted above)

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <unistd.h>

    #define BASIC_DELAY_TIME ( 1000000 / 15 )
    #define LINES_PER_FRAME 13

    main(void)
    {
    FILE * fd ;
    int I , end = 0 ;
    long delayTime ;
    char delayTimeString[128] ;
    char oneLine[128] ;

    fd = fopen ( "sw1.txt" , "rt" ) ;
    if ( fd == NULL ) {
    printf ( "Error! Couldn't read sw1.txt\n" ) ;
    return ;
    }
    while ((! feof(fd)) && (end != 1)) {
    if ( fgets ( delayTimeString , 120 , fd ) != NULL ) {
    delayTime = atol ( delayTimeString ) * BASIC_DELAY_TIME ;
    if ( delayTime == 0 ) {
    end = 1 ;
    printf ( "Bad delay time error\n" ) ;
    }
    else {
    printf ( "\x1b[2J\n" ) ;
    for ( I = 0 ; I LINES_PER_FRAME ; I ++ ) {
    if ( fgets ( oneLine , 120 , fd ) == NULL ) {
    end = 1 ;
    break ;
    }
    else {
    printf ( "%s" , oneLine ) ;
    }
    }
    usleep ( delayTime ) ;
    }
    } else {
    end = 1 ;
    }
    }
    fclose ( fd ) ;
    return ( 1 ) ;
    }

    /*EOF*/

    If the < and > tags didn't work above, replace them with lessthan (<) and greaterthan (>) signs (the angle brackets...)

    Jeff
  • Do you need to run it with a parameter or something? When I run "player", it finishes in about 3 seconds... sorry, don't know any C

  • Perl/Curses viewer (Score:5)

    by superfly ( 76 ) <grant@antiflux.org> on Saturday May 22, 1999 @09:35AM (#1883483) Homepage
    I'm working on an alternative viewer [antiflux.org] using Perl and Curses. Right now it supports pausing and multiple forward speeds (even though they aren't accurate). I plan to add reverse play once I fix the speed control.
  • I remember I downloaded a 4 minute "movie" of TradeWars... run the batch file (DOS), and hope you had ANSI.SYS (the infamous keyboard remapper) installed...

    Batchfile required tweaking so the movie played at the right rate (had a program that just spewed text from a file at a specified rate...).

    Say... I think NT supports ANSI...

  • Scary (Score:4)

    by SGC ( 32504 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @04:30AM (#1883487)
    I don't know what scared me more. The fact that someone actually had the time and energy to create that, or the fact that I actually sat and watched the whole thing. I might make popcorn and watch it again.

    c.
  • > Do you need to run it with a parameter or something?

    No, you just need to replace the line that reads
    if (delaytime = 0)
    with
    if (delaytime == 0)

  • TW2002 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now someone needs to go fix the old BBS game Tradewars to have this as one of the options at the Stardock Cinemas!
  • Hey! Installing the fonts makes it work! How 'bout that? Moderator, moderator, I need a moderator! Boost the previous post!

    http://www.ryans.dhs.org

  • Well, what about the great days when one was able to view an ASCII movie just by using his/her terminal emulation?

    I want to see it, too, but am not able to use Java. (Please don't say "Netscape" now)

  • Re:Linux terminal viewer (Score:3)

    by tomtom ( 23188 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @12:56PM (#1883494) Homepage
    Perl? Yet another case of too much tool for the job. :)

    Try this: Fire up an xterm and resize it to 15 lines long. Then 'less sw1.txt', and hold down ctrl-F.

    Ok, it might go a bit fast...
  • I don't think it's a firewall problem, because I got that error accessing the page from a regular dial-up connection. Weird.
  • I'm speechless.....
  • Mine does. It's called Netscape Communicator 4.07. And I'd rather not be able to see the asciimation, than have to reboot again my machine 5 times a day, thank you.

  • Re:Linux terminal viewer (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Aaggh. Slashdot ate my brackets.

    The first 3 lines should be, include stdio.h, include stdlib.h, and include unistd.h. I am not clever enough to figure out how to put less-than or greater-than signs here.

    Sorry!

  • I wrote a curses viewer which supports multiple playback speeds, pausing, and compression (that 930k movie file gzips into a nice little 37k bundle) Go grab it from http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~askalski/swplay.html [buffalo.edu] and enjoy :-)
  • Aaah, tradewars.

    *sigh*

    Those were the days. ;)
  • That would probably be highly illegal, just like distibuting an mpeg would be.

    Plus, I really enjoyed this one, especially after seeing Phantom Menace for the second time this morning. I just had to hear the sound difference between the two theatres. Big difference, the place I saw it first (nerd showing, 12:01AM, first regular showing in North America, because I'm as east as possible in Newfoundland, hahaha) had a way better sound system.
  • Posted by kenmcneil:

    Well for those of you who can't live without knowing how all this works...

    I used some of my infinite skills to open up the jar file that all this is stored in and to my amazement he put the source in there! SwPlay.java is the applet source and /data/sw1.txt is the animation text. Have fun!
    note: For those of you who don't know a .jar file is compressed like a .zip file so you can use unzip to extract everything.

  • Re:Linux terminal viewer (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 1999 @10:44AM (#1883507)
    ASCII and java don't mix ;-)

    wget http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lucas/339/swpl ay.jar
    unzip -j swplay.jar data/sw1.txt
    perl -pe 'if(/^(\d+)\s*$/){select undef,undef,undef,$1/15;$_="\e[H\e[J"}' sw1.txt

  • This is COOL! (Score:3)

    by Intosi ( 6741 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @05:02AM (#1883508) Homepage
    Hemos, I disagree with you. The man has a great hobby. My only question: will it run on a VT100? It would be nice to see something else than Startrek on my terminal :-)

    Intosi

  • Re:Hobby (Score:2)

    by BB ( 5050 )
    I disagree. I think he needs a new development platform, but this is art. Obviously a huge undertaking and the result is fascinating. Knowing how much time was spent creating it only makes it better. It reminds me of those strange things people build, like the glass house somewhere in Canada.

  • This should be a collaberative effort (Score:5)

    by Johnboy ( 15518 ) on Saturday May 22, 1999 @04:46AM (#1883511)
    I read the FAQ [fortunecity.com]. He doesn't want to Open Source it until he's finished. He's been working on it since July 1997! If enough people show interest and convince him to let us, does anybody want to form a "human render farm" and get this thing done sooner than 2036?

  • Re:The applet that JAVA was invented for (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This reminds of ttyquake.

    Quake on an vt100 terminal! :)

    http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/
  • But, what would drive a man to do this? I mean, it is quite clearly insane! But then, what would I know - I keep coding c64's and speccy's :)
    As an aside tho, what would be even cooler would be taking an MPG of The Phantom Menace (or A New Hope), and running it through a color equvalet AAlib (does aalib have a color mode yet?), and saving that. Of course, you would need sound as well, but hell, even just color ascii (or ansi... bbs's rule :) art would be cool enuf.
  • It's brilliant and beautiful. I can't imagine the dedication this guy must have. I'm waiting for Empire... :-)

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