ANSI Art is computer artwork that originated on BBS (bulletin board
systems) in the 1980s. It consisted of a combination of the fixed width
IBM/OEM (code page 437) font, and 16 colors.
The IBM font consisted of all of the standard keyboard letters and symbols, as well
as "extended" characters including shading characters, box drawing characters,
card suits, and many others:
IBM code page 437, used in BBS ANSI Art.
The 16 standard ANSI colors.
Clever use of the shading characters (
) allowed
BBS-era ANSI artists to mix two of the standard ANSI colors to create pseudo-colors:
Pseudo-colors created using shading characters.
The result was artwork like the following:
One caveat of ANSI art was that the brighter 8 ANSI colors could
only be used in the foreground of a character. The background had to be one of the
8 non-bright colors. This was sometimes frustrating, however the solid block
character (█) could be used to create what looked
like a bright background color with a space as the forecolor.
During the hay day of BBS, ANSI art was so popular that various art
groups were formed, releasing hundreds of packs of ANSI artwork files. Although
not as popular as it used to be, today there are still some who continue to draw
ANSI art.
FANSI 1.0 was first introduced in 2001 as an attempt to bring BBS-like ANSI art to MUDs
(multi-user dungeons, which are online multiplayer text-based games). The only
deviations from BBS ANSI art were:
- 9 of the 160 extended characters could not be displayed due
to limitations in MUD client software. Fortunately none of these characters were
critical, and it didn't effect any of the line drawing or shading characters.
- Due to a bug in some MUD client software programs, bright
background colors were allowed and soon became common practice among FANSI
artists. This subsequently became an official part of the standard. (This
becomes irrelevant in FANSI 2.0, however, as will be explained shortly.)
As MUD clients became more advanced, some client developers
attempted to develop standards that allowed more than the 16 ANSI colors. MXP
was developed, and although not solely about new colors, it does allow 16 million
colors via hex color values (ie: #FEFE0B). Similarly, some clients began to
support a 256 color extension to ANSI developed for the XTERM terminal emulator.
This allows less colors but is much easier to implement.
Currently, no one color extension has been adopted completely across the board,
and usually a MUD client adopts one or the other, but not both.
In 2008, FANSI 2.0 was developed, which adds support for:
- 256 colors, based upon the xterm 256 color codes. Clients
that support only MXP will have the 256 xterm colors converted to equivalent MXP codes.
Clients that don't support any form of 256 colors will have the 256 colors
downconverted into the standard 16 ANSI colors.
- No limitation on "bright" background and foreground
colors, including the ability to use any of the 256 colors at the same time in a
single character.