AAlib

AAlib (short for ASCII art library) is Jan Hubicka's 1997 software library that made it trivial to adapt still or moving bitmap images to [newschool] ASCII art, partly achieved through canny [GIF2ANS]-style algorithmic averaging out of each screen cell's display intensity paired to a character, and partly achieved through tinting the character displayed in that cell. Almost immediately upon release, it was being used to display digital video in terminal windows, then was applied to tougher problems such as playing iD Software's Quake in realtime with ASCII graphics output.

Though the [textmode art] creators of the [underground] computer [artscene] are generally unimpressed by output from [machine conversion] alogrithms, finding the human touch to be where most of the interesting nuances are to be found, this variety of conversion has nonetheless served to be an irresistable golden ring that generations of programmers haven't been able to resist reaching for -- an early example being Atari's 1975 Compugraph Foto, an ASCII art photo booth. Most public ASCII art communities you will find are awash in this low-effort machine output.