My earliest exposure to digital art was viewing ANSI art on bulletin board systems, a scrolling, text-based experience over a slow dial-up connection. There's something alluring about the simplicity of a limited color palette rendered with 80 character columns of text. The computers back then were restricted to primitive hardware. Graphics cards could only render 256 colors at a time. Sound cards used on-board oscillators to produce a finite number of sound waves. And yet the creative genius of programmers pushed these limitations to magnificent results.

ANSITUNES attempts to capture the spirit of that time. Using an elementary cellular automaton as the impetus, ASCII characters based on the code page 437 character set are rendered in VGA colors, and a chiptunes-style music score is generated using synth oscillators and noise algorithms. As the ANSI art scrolls, the music plays the ECA-generated song.

Click or tap anywhere on ANSITUNES to start the song.

On desktop, there are a number of keyboard commands available:
[?] Show or hide the Help screen
[SPACE] Play or pause ANSITUNES
[M] Mute or unmute the audio
[F] Toggle Fullscreen mode
[C] Toggle the CRT effect
[T] Export a TXT file (7680 rows max)
[P] Export a PNG high resolution file (2560x1920)
[W] Start and stop recording a WEBM audio file recording (3m max)

ANSITUNES is built entirely with code, using p5.js, Tone.js, JavaScript, and GLSL.