Sixteen Colors

Starting in 2004, Doug "lordscarlet" Moore was moved to pick up where Dark Domain had just recently left off, making the artpacks.acid.org collection not just available online once again but its contents perusable through a web browser, making any piece of computer art ever collected in an artpack (the site's name alludes to the assumption that the typical artpack content is ANSI art) instantly visually accessible there to anyone on the planet on any web-connected online device. Soon he had a working prototype up and running, which helped inspire and then work in tandem with growing momentum by the leaving-retirement ANSI artists in Blocktronics to inspire a powerful wave of [artscene] nostalgia (and a less powerful wave of underground computer art recidivism) over the following few years. Sixteen Colors (abbreviated 16c) inspired textmod.es and artpacks.org, two related artpack gallery projects that had slightly different angles on approximately the same mission, but ultimately it subsumed the first while the second has been left idle by the wayside.

In 2013 lordscarlet did a presentation about Sixteen Colors at the BSides conference, which you can learn more about via https://hackaday.com/2013/08/20/retrotechtacular-the-history-of-ansi-and-ascii-art/

The initial form of Sixteen Colors was not optimised, and there were obstacles in its regular use -- it would often go down, and adding new (and old-but-never-collected-the-first-time-around) artpacks to its collection was not a straightforward process to the casual user. There would be long delays waiting for updates... possibly after over a decade lordscarlet had reached the extent of his interest or ability to meet the demands of maintaining such an expansive project.

Fortunately, in 2018, another custodian (who prefers to remain anonymous) took on its administration with seemingly tireless enthusiasm and bottomless capability, among other achievements expanding the extensive art database with forums and an art rating system, the Blender-like [Sweet Sixteen Colors] compo, expanding [SAUCE] records into tag clouds for individual artworks, hosting collaborative Moebius and PabloDraw networked servers in which to draw joints, putting a static copy of Acheron back online for related historic interest, filling in gaps from the ACiD Artpacks archive with absent materials preserved elsewhere, establishing a [bridge] between ANSI art communities on Facebook Messenger and #16c on the [EFNet] IRC and Discord (and another for the [Blender]), introducing the Discord "Textmode Trivia" bot, and sharing regular social media (Facebook, Instagram, formerly Twitter) curations from the archive's fresh cuts and back stacks by Misfit of Blocktronics. Most importantly, they have designed it to not require regular human intervention, so the demands it makes on its custodian should not compound over time once it is set into motion.

Among other technologies (including PabloDraw), 16c relies on ansilove/C and ansilove.js from cleaner's [ansilove] suite of tools to convert raw text and text art formatted (eg. .ANS, .ASC, .BIN, .XBIN, IceDraw .IDF, Artworx .ADF and TundraDraw .TND) files into bitmaps for the convenience of the home viewer. 16c will also display many standard formats of bitmaps (eg. .GIF, .JPG, .PNG) and runs MS-DOS executables in js-dos. RIPscrip, ANSImation and [blinking ANSI] are also supported despite falling outside of standard use cases.

16c is not intended as an all-purpose computer art host, and as its name indicates, its mission is to showcase artpacks primarily consisting of ANSI art (and not, for example, of teletext screens. We have been asked rhetorically whether a teletext gallery would also be expected to host submitted ANSI art screens.) Mistigris has almost always had a hard time achieving anything like ANSI primacy among its stables of creators, and this has regrettably led to some friction with the 16c administration over the years. We strive to appreciate that as custodians of the only major outlet for underground artscene releases they have an important and difficult job to do, with bots and scrapers and scammers and spammers and griefers all gathered at the gates threatening to ruin the party for everyone at any moment. (Speaking of which, the Sixteen Colors archive of artpacks is mirrored on github separately from the gallery, so in the event of catastrophe, the collection won't be lost to the ages. Mozz hosts a partial mirror at https://ascii.mozz.us/textmode/ , and also the archive's API generously allows its contents to be browsed natively from PabloDraw and other similar programs.)

https://16colo.rs/