Posts tagged NFO

Ascension 1.0.3

Ascension 1.0.3 has been released today. You could describe this as a bugfix release, nearly no new features were added. The current build is not beta anymore, I wiped the last issues I encountered and Ascension should run smooth and stable. 

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Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 is released

I managed to do things even better and released Ascension 1.0.1 beta 2 today. You won’t recognize it at a first glance, but a lot has changed under the hood, thanks to your reports and overwhelming feedback. I’m quite sure the goal of creating the best ASCII art / NFO viewer (and editor) for Mac OS X is already reached. Unfortunately I did neither find time yet to create a project page nor to publish a gallery, but a recent screenshot can be found here. A project page will be available soon.

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Ascension 1.0.0 beta1 is out!

My ASCII Art viewer and editor for Mac has finally been released. For now Ascension supports NFO, DIZ and TXT files. Of course it can handle Unicode documents. Follow the link to browse the repository and get the beta. I will update my project site here as soon as possible. Let me know if anything is not working as expected.

Ascension - ASCII art for Mac OS X

Talking about ASCII art always means talking about computer history. This unique graphic design technique is text based art, consisting of pictures pieced together from the characters defined by the ASCII Standard in 1963. A special form called block ASCII (or high ASCII) uses extended chars of the 8-bit Code page 437, invented by IBM in 1979 for IBM PC and MS-DOS. Block ASCII is often referred as ANSI art. From the widespread usage traced to the bulletin board systems of the late 70’s and early 80’s grew a remarkable scene of devoted underground / online art groups. Over the years, warez groups began to incorporate ASCII art by spreading .nfo files with their releases. At the end of the 90’s the Newskool style emerged and came up with extended characters. Classic 7-bit ASCII chars remain predominant while the style developed further after the introduction and adaption of Unicode. On a modern OS, files containing ASCII art will never look as they were intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI art viewer even the block ASCII can be displayed properly. Unfortunately, for Mac OS X there is absolutely nothing available worth mentioning… until now. Let me introduce you to Ascension, ASCII art for the rest of us. 


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