Aalib 1.4rc4 review
DownloadAalib is a portable ascii art GFX library.I vote for simplicity
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Aalib is a portable ascii art GFX library.I vote for simplicity. There are many problems of various kinds with video cards, low frequency monitors, crashing graphical apps@dots{} AA-lib IS the solution. It works on a terminal of any kind, it is fast and portable, it gives to you standard API. It makes your old hardware more powerfull.
AA-lib is a low level gfx library just as many other libraries are. The main difference is that AA-lib does not require graphics device. In fact, there is no graphical output possible. AA-lib replaces those old-fashioned output methods with powerful ascii-art renderer. Now my linux boots with a nice penguin logo at secondary display (yes! Like Win95 does:) AA-lib API is designed to be similar to other graphics libraries. Learning a new API would be a piece of cake!
Once upon a time we've (my friend Kamil and I) bought two old Herculeses as secondary monitors. We didn't know for that time that our Diamond Stealths 64 cards would become obsolete soon. The next day we downloaded the logo of Linux Texas Users Group - nice silly penguin looking like a cowboy! It was so exciting logo ... we decided that we couldn't live without it and we wanted to see it at boot time as a logo on our secondary monitors. There was a small problem - Hercules doesn't support color graphics. So we decided to convert the penguin image to ascii art using netpbm tools.
The output was very ugly because the converting algorithm was absolutly stupid. During the night I designed a new convertor that used a font bitmap to creat an aproximation table. The output wasn't very good since the algorithm wasn't tuned so well. Many months this small piece of code was waiting on my disc for the day "D". Meanwhile I started a new project XaoS (a fractal zoomer) with my friend Thomas. And then I got an idea: Ascii Art Mandelbrots! I was really impressed by the result! XaoS was faster, portable and looking much better than ever before. I found a new way to go @dots{}
What's New in This Release:
Automake/libtools/autoconf updated.
Package restructured
Some bugfixes.
New "raw" keyboard driver for linux console alowing to detect key releases.
Fixed -malign-double gcc binarry compatibility problem
Added const keywords to sources where possible.
AAlib.h documented
Lots of fixes from Debian maitainer Joey Hess installed
c2man generated manual pages added
Rest of changelog was lost in the disc crash....
Fixed X driver handling of refresh
Optimized X driver
X driver now allows setting font using AAFont environment variable
Added aalib-config
Aalib 1.4rc4 keywords