hates the internet

Many years ago, before there was an internet (at least publically), we had to exchange information by squealing odd sounding noises down phone wires. This data was usually displayed in a text-mode terminal emulator, so needless to say your options as an artist were severely limited.  Several people overcame these limitations with great success and FLansi is my homage to them.

It's an almost complete implementation of the ANSI standard, I left out the more useless bits like being able to reassign keys. It might not look like it thanks to the speed of modern computers, but FlANSI also supports ANSI animation, it just happens too fast for the naked eye to see. Coming in the next version will be a modem simulator which lets you choose the baud rate at which to render the ANSI.

FlANSI is actually two parts: FlANSI Viewer which, much like it sounds, renders an ANSI live in the browser, and the more interesting FlANSI Terminal, which connects to a telnetable BBS and lets you access telnetable BBSes without needing to install any special software or obscure fonts on your machine.

There are a few things to work out, like whether or not crossdomain.xml is going to be able to help me out, but I'm pretty sure I can cobble something together, even if I have to mess with port forwarding (I seriously doubt a few people using BBSes are going to make too big a dent in my traffic). I promise my loyal readers by 2009 you'll be able to play BRE and TradeWars with things looking the way they should.

FlANSI Rundown

• Written in ActionScript 3, developed using an ActionScript project in Adobe Flex Builder 3
• Mostly ANSI X3.64 compliant, except:
  • Input-related clag (key assigning, etc) and erasing
  • Terminal controls (excluding position and colour)
  • No ANSI music yet

Known Issues

• Some longer ANSIs render to over 2,000 pixels in height. Fix planned for next version
  •  ANSIs can now render to any arbitratry height!
• Animations happen way too quickly to see. Fix planned for next version
  • Clicking on a FLansi rendering will redraw at approximately 16.8kbps
• Sometimes characters wind up in the wrong places. Irreproducible.

Screenshots