AAlib is a software library which allows applications to automatically convert still and moving images into ASCII art. It was released by Jan Hubicka as part of the BBdemo project in 1997.
AAlib has been used in a wide variety of programs, including a conversion of Quake II which allows the 3D game to be played on dumb terminals, [1] and to let media players output in text mode (Xine, MPlayer, VLC). [2]
AAlib is freely distributed [3] under the terms of the LGPLv2. [4]
ASCII, an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. ASCII has just 128 code points, of which only 95 are printable characters, which severely limit its scope. The set of available punctuation had significant impact on the syntax of computer languages and text markup. ASCII hugely influenced the design of character sets used by modern computers, including Unicode which has over a million code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as ASCII.
ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text-based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
Quake III Arena is a 1999 multiplayer-focused first-person shooter developed by id Software. The third installment of the Quake series, Arena differs from previous games by excluding a story-based single-player mode and focusing primarily on multiplayer gameplay. The single-player mode is played against computer-controlled bots. It features music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly founder Bill Leeb.
Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake series, following Quake.
Quake is a first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. The first game in the Quake series, it was originally released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux in 1996, followed by Mac OS and Sega Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998.
UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from Unicode Transformation Format – 8-bit.
Michael Abrash is an American programmer and technical writer. He is best known for his magazine articles and books on code optimization and graphics for IBM PC compatibles and for working at id Software in the mid-1990s on the rendering technology for Quake. Since 2014, he has been the chief scientist of Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms.
SmallBASIC is a BASIC programming language dialect with interpreters released as free software under the GNU General Public License version 3 for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Android.
The backtick` is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It is also known as backquote, grave, or grave accent.
Graphviz is a package of open-source tools initiated by AT&T Labs Research for drawing graphs specified in DOT language scripts having the file name extension "gv". It also provides libraries for software applications to use the tools. Graphviz is free software licensed under the Eclipse Public License.
The KDE Advanced Text Editor, or Kate, is a source code editor developed by the KDE free software community. It has been a part of KDE Software Compilation since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001. Intended for software developers, it features syntax highlighting, code folding, customizable layouts, multiple cursors and selections, regular expression support, and extensibility via plugins. The text editor's mascot is Kate the Cyber Woodpecker.
A lightweight markup language (LML), also termed a simple or humane markup language, is a markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Lightweight markup languages are used in applications where it may be necessary to read the raw document as well as the final rendered output.
The Quake engine is the game engine developed by id Software to power their 1996 video game Quake. It featured true 3D real-time rendering. Since 2012, it has been licensed under the terms of GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.
id Tech 3, popularly known as the Quake III Arena engine, is a game engine developed by id Software for its Quake III Arena. It has been adopted by numerous games. It competed with the Unreal Engine; both engines were widely licensed.
SVGAlib is an open-source low-level graphics library which ran on Linux and FreeBSD and allowed programs to change video mode and display full-screen graphics, without the use of a windowing system. Alongside X11 and the General Graphics Interface, it was one of the earliest libraries allowing graphical video games on Linux.
The Quake II engine is a game engine developed by id Software for use in their 1997 first-person shooter Quake II. It is the successor to the Quake engine. Since its release, the Quake II engine has been licensed for use in several other games.
Tremulous is a free and open source asymmetric team-based first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements. Being a cross-platform development project the game is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
UFO: Alien Invasion is a strategy video game in which the player fights aliens that are trying to take control of the Earth. The game is heavily influenced by the X-COM series, especially X-COM: UFO Defense.
id Tech is a series of separate game engines designed and developed by id Software. Prior to the presentation of the id Tech 5-based game Rage in 2011, the engines lacked official designation and as such were simply referred to as the Doom and Quake engines, from the name of the main game series the engines had been developed for. "id Tech" has been released as free software under the GNU General Public License. id Tech versions 0 to 3 were released under GPL-2.0-or-later. id Tech versions 3.5 to 4.5 were released under GPL-3.0-or-later. id Tech 5 to 7 are proprietary, with id Tech 7 currently being the latest utilized engine.
Org Mode is a mode for document editing, formatting, and organizing within the free software text editor GNU Emacs and its derivatives, designed for notes, planning, and authoring. The name is used to encompass plain text files that include simple marks to indicate levels of a hierarchy, and an editor with functions that can read the markup and manipulate hierarchy elements.