This Ansi section of Catgirls Paradise will showcase some of the art I've made in my BBS days. ANSI stands for 'American National Standards Institute' and is also the abbreviation used for describing text code that implements colors with characters found through the 'alt + numeric pad' code shortcuts. Ansi pictures can be viewed with an appropriate viewer or by launching the image as a batch file (.bat). They can also be created with relative ease by using an application such as Aciddraw (my favorite) by the legendary scene art group 'ACiD'. In order to facilitate things for everyone, I've converted the Ansi pics into GIF file format using an application called GDS (Grafics Display System), a rather old (but good) image viewing application ^_^

If you wish to try Aciddraw for yourself, you can find the patched version over here (a pre-patched version will not work under some processors and operating systems). Be aware that this is a strictly DOS based application

Finally, in order to explain the Ansi style a bit better, it could be summed up like this: An Ansi (or an Ascii - basically a black and white image using mostly keyboard characters such as $ signs and so on) is an image which has a defined width, but no specific height. An Ansi/Ascii picture always has a width of 80 keyboard characters across (i.e. 80 letters or boxes) and may be thousands of lines tall. This is what makes Ansi very interesting, in that we have pictures which are sometimes very tall... An Ansi picture is normally viewed full screen and scrolled (up/down) to view the rest of the picture. At first, an Ansi picture may seem quite crude in style since the blocks are huge, but each Ansi pic is made pixel by pixel, character by character. A large picture may take up to a week or two to make (and this is a week or two of near constant work )

History: Way back in the BBS days, around 7-8 years ago, a friend of mine who goes by the nick name 'Maverick' showed me his BBS (Bulletin Board System) that he called 'RaveBase'. RaveBase was one of Europe's better music based BBS and did quite well. I was facinated by the look of it all and quite liked how everything was constructed of purely DOS based keycharacters. At that time, I had a mostly DOS based computer myself (my loving 286 and 386, lol) and I did almost everything in DOS.

One day Maverick showed me how Aciddraw worked, and so I began making Ansi and Ascii (and even some Anscii, i.e. colored Ascii) works. It was at this time that I began using my first nick name of MANGAfan. I shortly became quite famous in the Swiss BBS scene and have at times been voted one of the best Swiss scene artists (this made me quite chuffed). In those few years (that are also considered some of the last true BBS days before the internet truly took over everything we do) I did Ansi art for two art groupies under my new name of Shinigami. One of them was the Swiss group Devotion, and the other one was eXpose (a Dutch group). I then began my own group to release the final bits of my work mostly because I was a rather active person in the Ansi scene.

I've also released work for the Swiss scene magazines 'Defline', 'Trip' and 'Pain' in the form of pictures and articles... I guess I could say I was quite an active guy at the time Also, there is something that I used to do that was very rare of most Ansi artists of the time. I would write quite a LOT of nonsense at the end of my art. Sometimes little bits of info, sometimes even a poem. I felt that apoem was obligatory when I made BBS intro pics.

In the following pages, you can find all the Ansi/Ascii/Anscii works I've ever done. Every single one of them. They are mostly organised along the lines of the 'art packs' that they were released in. I hope you will enjoy this little showcase of what I did way back then