For those unaware, Sixteen Colors ANSI Art and ASCII Art Archive is a comprehensive archive of the ANSI Art and ASCII Art computer scenes beginning in 1991. ANSI and ASCII were used extensively in the days prior to the World Wide Web to convey imagery in online communities. ANSI and ASCII artists released what became known as packs containing artwork they created.
Sixteen Colors is now closer than ever to the goals I have set for it. A labor of love (off again/on again) for nearly a decade, Sixteen Colors finally has a quality search engine and community driven metadata management. You can finally go to a list of groups or artists to find artwork. The validity of those lists are now in your hands. Using OpenID you may login and modify any of the data associated with a pack or artwork. In addition, you can mark your favorites and return to them later to enjoy over and over.
The initial data has been populated almost exclusively via SAUCE data. This data, while helpful, is largely flawed. I am making attempts to clean some of it up. However, due to the singular nature of much of the data, it can only be entirely cleaned through your input.
I have received a lot of help and opinions along the way to creating the new version of the site. I want to single out three individuals that were particularly helpful. agent_42 has been my constant ear to bend about technical and design details. He also took my original design and cleaned it up extensively. Without his encouragement and enthusiasm I would never have completed as much as I have. In addition my brother, Wade (Ralgoth), has been as equally supportive. This past week Wade has also been manually going through the packs and adding as much data as possible. Lastly, I can not give enough praise to eto and all he has done for me and the scene by creating PabloDraw and PabloView. I have leveraged the code written for PabloView to do all of the conversion of ANSI/ASCII/IDF/ADF/XBIN files to PNG. I don’t know that eto receives the credit he deserves for his contribution to the ANSI art and ASCII art scenes. There are many others that have given their advice and words of encouragement along the way, but I will not name them individually for fear of leaving someone out.
I am headed out to the 20 goto 10 ANSI gallery showing this weekend, January 12, 2008. If anyone is there, feel free to find me and say “Hello.” Acidjazz has done a fantastic job of putting the event together, and I am anxious to see the final results.
As with most sites, development is ongoing. Consider Sixteen Colors a living entity, both in the data and the available features. Unfortunately I had to rush things out the door a little in order to put the new version of the site up in time for the gallery opening. I apologize in advance for some of the clunky UI and general unpolished feel; they should improve over the next year. Please contact me with any comments, concerns, questions or bugs.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I left a very important individual off the list of recognitions. Tracker1, from The Roughneck BBS has hosted Sixteen Colors for roughly the last 4 years. He has allowed me to spend little time worrying about the server, continually upgraded the hardware without any request from me and done all of it at his own expense.