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Credits(alphabetically) ======================= Jan Hubicka (hubicka@freesoft.cz) Most of aalib code, dos and unix drivers, documentation Thomas A. K. Kjaer (takjaer@daimi.aau.dk) OS/2 driver Tim Newsome (nuisance@cmu.edu) Many extensions into aasave driver. Kamil Toman (toman@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz) documentation, some ideas Why such library? ================= I vote for simplicity. There are many problems of various kinds with video cards, low frequency monitors, crashing graphical apps... AA-lib IS the solution. It works on a terminal of any kind, it is fast and portable, it gives to you standard API. It gives to your old hardware more power! Supports: dos (VGA + MDA), stdio, curses, slang, X11, gpm, linux-console, OS/2 What does this software do then ? ================================= AA-lib is a low level gfx library just as many other libraries are. The main difference is that AA-lib does not require graphics device. In fact, there is no graphical output possible. AA-lib replaces those old-fashioned output methods with powerful ascii-art renderer. Now my linux boots with a nice penguin logo at secondary display (yes! Like Win95 does:) AA-lib API is designed to be similar to other graphics libraries. Learning a new API would be a piece of cake! How this all started ==================== Once upon a time we've (my friend Kamil and I) bought two old Herculeses as secondary monitors. We didn't know for that time that our Diamond Stealths 64 cards would become obsolete soon. The next day we downloaded the logo of Linux Texas Users Group - nice silly penguin looking like a cowboy! It was so exciting logo ... we decided that we couldn't live without it and we wanted to see it at boot time as a logo on our secondary monitors. There was a small problem - Hercules doesn't support color graphics. So we decided to convert the penguin image to ascii art using netpbm tools. The output was very ugly because the converting algorithm was absolutely stupid. During the night I designed a new convertor that used a font bitmap to creat an approximation table. The output wasn't very good since the algorithm wasn't tuned so well. Many months this small piece of code was waiting on my disc for the day "D". Meanwhile I started a new project XaoS (a fractal zoomer) with my friend Thomas. And then I got an idea: Ascii Art Mandelbrots! I was really impressed by the result! XaoS was faster, portable and looking much better than ever before. I found a new way to go ... AA-Project ********** dT8 8Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb <PROJECT><PROJECT> dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb Three goals of AA-Project: 1. Port all important software (like Doom, Second Reality, X windows etc..) on AA-lib. 2. Port AA-lib on all available platforms (mainly ZX-Spectrum and Sharp). 3. Force IBM to start manufacturing MDA cards again. AA-project was started by Jan Hubicka. In that times just a few people knew about it. Then a new demo named BB has been released to show the power of AA-lib technology. Now the project is freely available and anyone can help. Where to find AA-lib ******************** Just join our mailing list: `aa-project-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net'. Or just browse our homepage at `http://aa-project.sourceforge.net'. A ton of examples of ascii-art generated by aalib, pointers to other AA-Project resources etc.