 | |
| Formation | 1994 |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Artscene warez |
| Location |
|
Founders | Roy (aka Carsten Cumbrowski) and Hetero (aka Sebastian) |
Products | SAC Scener Art Packs |
| Website | SuperiorArtCreations.com |
Superior Art Creations (SAC) is an underground artscene group which caters primarily to and is well known within the warez scene. SAC members have made, besides ANSI and ASCII art, VGA bitmap graphics, tracker music, and a variety of other works. SAC's character graphics have also been used in bottles and FTP servers.
SAC originated as a German-based art group, founded in December 1994 by six members: Dream Design, Kaethe, Raiser, Toxic Trancer and the two artists Hetero [1] and Roy, with Roy acting as the primary organizer of the group. The first SAC Art Pack was released the same month at "The Party" Demo Party in Herning, Denmark.
During the mid to late 1990s most of the notable ANSI artscene groups had distanced themselves from the warez scene, rather creating art for the sake of art, or for bulletin boards that were purely artscene related. Seizing this opportunity, SAC moved into this vacant territory and quickly became recognized as the leading group of warez scene artists. [2] SAC was also able to establish credibility and respect from non-warez art groups and also demogroups of the broad and diverse computer art scene that was already established at the time.
From the very beginning SAC had a very loose group structure. Members worked mostly independently with little if any direction from the group leaders. Every member has the freedom to decide for himself which art requests he is willing to fulfill and which not. Seniority was achieved by being an active member for an extended period of time. Exceptions were made occasionally for outstanding contributions to the Group. New member applications were accepted or rejected by a simple majority vote of the existing members. It was never the decision of a single person (regardless of the status of that member). All new member applications and artwork samples were published in designated member-only areas at the SAC World Headquarter BBS "Closed Society" which was located in Berlin, Germany. The applications were also made available on the Internet at SAC's IRC Channel #SAC on the EFnet and SAC FTP Server HQ's.
The role of the leader was primarily the task (which wasn't always simple) of collecting the new artwork produced by members and assembling the new SAC Art Pack, updating the group's NFO file and releasing the Pack. This was not a problem because the leader of SAC Roy/SAC was also the SysOp of the SAC World headquarter BBS called "Closed Society".
For a brief period, SAC also had a PPE (PCBoard Programming Executable) section; this was eventually separated out from SAC and became the PPE Group "Peanuts" (Abbreviation: PNS).
PPE's are programs written in the proprietary PCBoard Script Language PPL (PCBoard Programming Language). They could only be used for PCBoard and no other BBS Software. PCBoard was very popular at the time and was used by over 90% of the warez BBS systems that were running on a PC. The introduction of PPL in PCBoard Version 15.0 boosted the popularity of the until then fairly unknown BBS software by Clark Development. Up to this time the PC (warez) scene did not have a powerful BBS software that could compete with the Amiga BBS software Ami-Express (Short: Ami-X or simply /X). Almost all warez BBS systems running on Amigas used /X. The PC adaptation of /X called PC Express saw a brief period of widespread use but was soon replaced by PCBoard 15.x.
All SAC PPE's and SAC Art Packs are available for download at the SAC founder's website. The official SAC website is currently under development.
Towards the late 1990s, a good majority of NFO file ASCII art was created by various members of SAC. In 1999, lead ASCII artist ferrex ascended to the role of senior staff and leader, continuing to control the group to this day.
Now a globally operating organization, SAC employs approximately 40 artists and programmers worldwide and continues to be one of the groups creating art for the warez scene.
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.
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called computer bulletin board service (CBBS), is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
The computer art scene, or simply artscene, is the community interested and active in the creation of computer-based artwork.
.nfo is a filename extension for text files that accompany warez scene releases of pirated software or media.
ACiD Productions (ACiD) is a digital art group. Founded in 1990, the group originally specialized in ANSI artwork for BBSes. More recently, they have extended their reach into other graphical media and computer software development. During the BBS-era, their biggest competitor was iCE Advertisements.
Christian Wirth, better known by the pseudonym RaD Man, is an American computer artist and historian. He works in the field of ANSI art, a method of creating art using a limited set of text characters and color escape codes based loosely on the relevant ANSI standard.
FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain-text file containing a brief description of the content of archive to which it belongs. Such files were originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBSes) and is still used in the warez scene. FILE_ID stands for "file identification". DIZ stands for "description in zipfile".
ANSI art is a computer art form that was widely used at one time on bulletin board systems. It is similar to ASCII art, but constructed from a larger set of 256 letters, numbers, and symbols — all codes found in IBM code page 437, often referred to as extended ASCII and used in MS-DOS and Unix environments. ANSI art also contains special ANSI escape sequences that color text with the 16 foreground and 8 background colours offered by ANSI.SYS, an MS-DOS device driver loosely based upon the ANSI X3.64 standard for text terminals. Some ANSI artists take advantage of the cursor control sequences within ANSI X3.64 in order to create animations, commonly referred to as ANSImations. ANSI art and text files which incorporate ANSI codes carry the de facto.ANS file extension.
An artpack is an archive of computer artwork which is distributed in a compressed format such as ZIP or RAR.
TheDraw is a text editor for MS-DOS to create ANSI and animations as well as ASCII art. The editor is especially useful to create or modify files in ANSI format and text documents, which use the graphical characters of the IBM ASCII code pages, because they are not supported by Microsoft Windows anymore. The first version of the editor was developed in 1986 by Ian E. Davis of TheSoft Programming Services. The last public version of the editor was version 4.63, which was released in October 1993.
The Humble Guys (THG) were a cracking group for the IBM PC during the late 1980s founded by two friends known by the pseudonyms Candyman and Fabulous Furlough. The group was also noticed in the demoscene for some of their cracktros.
The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community. However, as files were commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k.
PCBoard (PCB) was a bulletin board system (BBS) application first introduced for DOS in 1983 by Clark Development Company. Clark Development was founded by Fred Clark. PCBoard was one of the first commercial BBS packages for DOS systems, and was considered one of the "high end" packages during the rapid expansion of BBS systems in the early 1990s. Like many BBS companies, the rise of the Internet starting around 1994 led to serious downturns in fortunes, and Clark Development went bankrupt in 1997. Most PCB sales were of two-line licenses; additional line licenses were also available.
Soulz at Zero (SAZ) was a lit group formed in 1994 by Jack Flack and The Stranger. SAZ released 25 monthly packs over a period of two years, beginning in September 1994 and ending in September 1996. The group took its name from a Souls at Zero poster Flack had in his bedroom at the time, with the trailing "s" in "Souls" changed to a "z". Soulz at Zero was so well known that their name was added to the "Elite Acronym List," which was used to separate "lamers" from "elite users."
Creators of Intense Art, or Cia was an underground computer artscene group that primarily released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1993 to 2001. Along with iCE and ACiD, Cia was one of the most active, and longest lasting groups on the artscene.
Fire, later known as Fire Graphics, was an underground computer artscene group that released ANSI, ASCII, and high resolution artwork from 1994 to 1998.
AmiExpress - also known as /X - by Synthetic Technologies was a popular BBS software application for the Commodore Amiga line of computers. AmiExpress was extremely popular among the warez scene for trading (exchanging) software.
textfiles.com is a website dedicated to preserving the digital documents that contain the history of the bulletin board system (BBS) world and various subcultures, and thus providing "a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them". The site categorizes and stores thousands of text files, primarily from the 1980s, but also contains some older files and some that were created well into the 1990s. A broad range of topics is presented, including anarchy, art, carding, computers, drugs, ezines, freemasonry, computer games, hacking, phreaking, politics, computer piracy, sex, and UFOs. The site was created and is run by Jason Scott.
Aces of ANSI Art was the first group of artists specifically organized for the purposes of creating and distributing ANSI art. The group was founded and operated by two BBS enthusiasts from California, "Zyphril" and "Chips Ahoy", from 1989 through 1991.
Offline websites via Archive.org