If you’ve ever preserved teletext, there’s a survey for you to take! A friend of ours is doing it, as part of his studies at Gothenburg University, and we want to help out. Take it here or read more here.
A global look at teletext
Brief explanation
Teletext is a weird technology. Although often ridiculed as completely archaic, it’s very popular in many countries still today. It seems like the public broadcasters in Europe just can’t get people to stop using it, no matter what new services they provide.
You most likely know teletext in the British version, with blocky text graphics in few colours, that came intertwined with the analogue TV-signal. This is called World System Teletext. But that was only the beginning. Teletext came in vector and pixel graphics, it was used for games and multimedia… there was even FM and PCM audio for teletext in Japan!
When you take a global perspective on teletext, it’s actually quite hard to say what teletext is. But let’s start in the UK in the 1970’s, when teletext was used for subtitles and text-based screens that you could flick through with your remote control.
Young teletext
In 1971, Philip’s engineer John Adams wrote a technical proposal to use the “invisible” part of the TV-signal (VBI) to transmit closed captions for the hearing impaired.* This was the starting point of three government bodies in the UK developing their own standards. BBC and IBA developed their own systems, agreed on a common standard (p.106), and launched Ceefax (1974) and ORACLE (1978) respectively. The third standard was the videotex-standard Prestel from the British Post Office.
Teletext Level 1 (1976) featured two character sets: a basic ASCII-like one, and a graphical one with so-called sixels. The screen was 40×24 characters and there was a palette of 7 predefined colours. Control codes, like switching between colours or character sets, required using an empty character on the screen. Level 1.5 (1981) added support for national character sets and it remains the most widely used teletext standard today. These British standards became known as World System Teletext (WST).
🡆 UK teletext posts
🡆 Galax Teletext lets you teletextify your website
There was a teletext alternative that offered slightly more sophisticated graphics than WST did: the French Antiope standard, also developed in the 1970s. It was based on telecommunications (data packets) rather than a stream of TV-frames, which made it more flexible with control codes. It offered background colours and a variable font size already around 1977, as seen below and in a German news clip.
Antiope was a clever standard, and it had political and cultural signifance fo France. The American dominance in information technology, telecommunications and satellites after World War II was considered a threat to French national soveiregnity.* The Antiope technology formed a response to this perceived threat, but the real challenge was to establish it on the market. There was considerable rivalry with the UK, which apparently made the two countries “the laughing stock of the videotex world”. (p.133) Most TVs in Europe would eventually be equipped with British decoders, and very few countries used Antiope for teletext.* But guess what? One of those countries was France’s nemesis, the United States of America.
🡆 More Antiope graphics
Before we go there, let’s clarify something before we go deeper. There is a difference between the display level and the transmission level. Teletext graphics (display) can be used for videotex transmission, and videotex graphics can be used for teletext transmissions. France’s Antiope standard could be used for teletext as well as videotex. And teletext doesn’t have to use the blocky graphics that we know from the UK, as we’ll see soon.
| Display | Transmission | |
| Teletext | Usually basic textmode, but also vector graphics, etc | Normally one-way information using TV-broadcasting, but not always |
| Videotex | Enhanced textmode or vector graphics, but also pixel graphics | Usually two-way telecommunications, but also local terminals, etc |
Canada
Canada’s government laboratory CRC developed Telidon in the 1970’s. It was designed both for teletext and videotex and used its own form of vector graphics called PDI. It was launched in 1978 and numerous trials were carried out in Canada for a few years. The complex graphics required a $2,000 decoder for the user, which was a bit hefty for a one-way teletext service, so we will return to Telidon later in the videotex section.*
Teletext goes to Hollywood
While Europe managed to settle on one teletext standard rather quickly, aided by national public service monopolies (p.19), and Canada had gone all-in on Telidon, it was more complicated in USA. Reagan promoted de-regulation and the the national agency FCC, which normally regulates US tech-standards, were taking a step back when it came to teletext.**
Early American teletext entrepreneurs had three choices: Antiope, WST and Telidon. (Micro TV was a rarely mentioned predecessor*) The televisions sold in USA supported the British WST-standard, if they supported teletext at all. But the British were slow to modify their system to the American TV-standard, so it was risky for teletext entrepreneurs to go for WST.* As I understand it, Zenith was the only TV-manufacturer in USA that supported WST, so it was a chaotic situation for both producers and consumers.* Which TV supports which standard now, and how about next year?
CBS ran tests in 1979 to compare Antiope and WST, and encountered several problems with WST. They decided on Antiope, and petitioned the FCC to adopt their modification of Antiope as a national standard.* Meanwhile AT&T, whose early experiments later led to the notorious Viewtron videotex, announced their own display standard in 1981-1982. (p.28) It was called PLP and it was based on the vector graphics of Telidon, while also supporting enhanced textmode graphics.** It added features for changing the font (DRCS, see below), spacing text proportionally and creating graphics macros (such as a logotype) and pasting them.* (details on p.82)
PLP was endorsed by major teletext/videotex companies in USA, who eventually got CBS on their side aswell. Canada came on board and US organizations such as ANSI, CSA, EIA and the Videotex Technical Experts Panel all worked towards a new standard based on PLP. The focus of the standard was primarily vector graphics (for videotex), but also included textmode graphics (for teletext). The purpose was to have one single standard for both teletext and videotex.* In 1983 it became the national standard NAPLPS (North American Presentation Layer Protocol Syntax)* which covered the display level. The transmission level standard (for teletext) was not formally standardized as NABTS until 1986.
A competition without winners
When you read about the history of NAPLPS, you will notice that there are two different ways to do it. One way is to frame it purely as a US invention. Telidon and Antiope are either completely omitted, or they are mentioned as something that was replaced.* But that seems unfair. Without the publicly funded research and development of France and Canada, NAPLPS would be something else, if it would exist at all. It has been claimed that NAPLPS was “heavily derived” from Antiope and Telidon.** Or even worse.
Telidon became the international standard that Canadian investors dreamed of. It was the foundation of the Canada/US North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS), which spread around the globe. Unfortunately, the code was changed deliberately so that all of the Canadian equipment and most of the content became useless, thus wiping out the competitive lead investors were counting on. Ironically, the winner, NAPLPS, rapidly became the loser when personal computers and the internet rolled over everything.
- Telidon Art Project website, 2024-02-26
The Canadian Telidon-artist Bill Perry describes Telidon as a $200 million boondoggle – a waste of money. Canadian public funding gave their companies an advantage over USA, something that the trade agreement NAFTA was designed to prevent, according to Perry, who concluded that “Telidon was the seed of NAPLPS and NAPLPS was the seed of NAFTA”* which seems like a beautiful exaggeration.
Public service Europe
Meanwhile in Europe, the French Antiope standard had already lost the battle against the British WST. Some countries tested Antiope, but only a few adopted it.* France did, of course, and they managed to keep it going until the early 1990’s when they finally switched to WST.* Their Antiope videotex, on the other hand, was a huge success, but more about that later.
The British WST-standard was used in 41 countries by some accounts (p.116), although I think the number is closer to 21.* It was relatively simple and cheap to implement, since the infrastructure was already there and most TV-manufacturers supported it. There were some regulatory issues, especially concerning ads and conflicts with the news media, but WST teletext was embraced politically by most countries in Europe. It became almost emblematic for European public service, and it is still around today, some 40 years later. At least 15 countries* broadcast teletext today (2024), with the same blocky graphics and a significant amount of daily users.
It is often assumed that teletext was mostly a thing in Western Europe, but that is not the case. Before we go East beyond the iron curtain, I’d like to mention Turkey. There are captures of very cool Turkish teletext graphics from the 1990’s.* Yugoslavia is even more interesting example, as a communist country that was not aligned with the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia launched a national teletext in 1984 and Croatia started their own teletext service just before declaring independence in 1991. It became an important source of information during the war.**
Back in the USSR
The Eastern Bloc was generelly late to adopt teletext, except for Hungary (1982). Germany is an interesting case, since the iron curtain went right through it in the 1980s. The TV broadcasts from West Germany’s reached East Germany (GDR) and therefore the Eastern Bloc. So GDR developed their own TV-stations and aired programs like Der schwarze Kanal that re-edited news from the West and added a communist commentary. But they did not broadcast teletext, because there were very few TVs in the country that supported it. However, there were test broadcasts as late as 1989, preserved by the Videotext museum.* (the old German term for teletext is videotext, confusingly)
Poland started with teletext broadcasts in 1988, the year before they exited the USSR. I have not been digging into it much, but I did find an odd commercial for the Polish Mediatext teletext and its erotic teletext services, supposedly from ca 2010 (if it’s not fake?).
While browsing the internets for teletext in various countries, I didn’t come across much information about broadcasting your own teletext. I wasn’t expecting to. But it seems to have been different in Russia. This hobbyist site explains how to use a teletext generator and how to apply for the right permissions to broadcast it. One of the suppliers of the teletext generators, Wladimir Solovjev, started to broadcast his own teletext service in 1991 or 1992. It was called Peterburgksiy Teletext and it was active for 15 years. It seems to have been a small teletext-only media company, broadcasted by three different local channels.*
We started broadcasting in this format on television channels back in 1991. I was the first to do this on a significant territory of Russia. Later, teletext appeared on the First Television Channel, with our help.
- Wladimir Solovjev, e-mail correspondence 2024-02-26
The British journalist Steve Rosenberg was involved in the official national teletext in Russia, which he talks about in this podcast.
Two more unusual things about Russian teletext is worth mentioning before moving on. 1) Someone hacked a Russian teletext service to add anti-war messages on Victory Day 2022, according to this. 2) New teletext services continued to appear well into the 2000’s, such as MTV Russia in 2006-2007.**
English is not enough
A fundamental issue with WST was that the character set was initially only basic Latin, which is not good for much else than English. WST had to be adapted for other languages, which was not difficult in countries like Sweden, Hungary (although, there are Swedish characters in this video?), Netherlands and West Germany. It was “just” a matter of adding a few characters.** Some countries settled for not having a full character set, like Yugoslavia who in 1984 didn’t have any diacritics.*
It was more work to adapt WST for Arabic, Cyrillic, Farsi and Vietnamese. It required custom hard- and software for WST to support these character sets, which is explained here by Colin Hinson who was part of creating systems for Vietnam, Russia and Ukraine. Vietnamese was particularly tricky, because it uses 134 Vietnamese characters in addition to basic Latin. That is too much for WST to deal with, but apparently they were able to fix it by simply removing 6 characters. :-)
But what about scripts with thousands of characters, which is common in Asia?
Meanwhile in Asia
Singapore and Malaysia* were the first countries in Asia to broadcast teletext nationally in 1983 and 1985 respectively. Singapore published teletext in English and Malaysia in Malay, but they both used WST and the Latin script. Examples are available at the Teletext Museum.**
Meanwhile, Japan was one of the leading tech countries in the world, and had no reason to limit themselves to 128 characters. They had established their ASCII-compatible JIS-standard already in 1969 and since 1971 they had been working on a combined hardware for (what the West would call) teletext and videotex (p.20). In Japan they knew that the issue was not only about large character sets, but also about the fonts. It was simply not possible represent their intricately detailed characters with a tiny font size, like the common WST font with 6×10 pixels.
The solution crystalized as the hybrid standard JTES, which became one of four global teletext standards in 1986. It supported kanji, katakana and hiragana characters using an 8×12 font, with a resolution of 8×15 characters on the screen.* Any missing characters could be added with customizable characters (a technique called DRCS). Vector graphics similar to NAPLPS was supported, and JTES also offered pixel graphics in a resolution of 248×240, although it was slow to load, especially with many colours (p.21). Finally, JTES supported sound. It could use an FM-soundchip or PCM-samples using the so-called BEST system.*
All in all – JTES seems to have been on a different level than Europe and USA, although I don’t know if all these features were available from the beginning. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the incredibly dense Japanese Wikipedia page on teletext. Let me know if you manage to get through it…
In South Korea, Munhwa Broadcasting (MBC) launched teletext in 1988 and it seems to have used a hybrid approach, similar to Japan. This video shows 15×8 characters printed one-by-one, with vector graphics in the background. It could be the JTES-standard, but I am not sure. This document about videotex in Korea might provide more details.
🡆 More Korean teletext posts
China never really used teletext, although they did develop their own technologies and tested them on several channels.* They made a new standard based on WST, called CCST. It supported 3000 characters and drew the rest as pixel graphics. CPLPS was based on NAPLPS and featured Chinese characters and vector graphics. Learn more
Hong Kong was early to adopt videotex, and it was heavily used in the financial industry. Financial data was produced, distributed and refined in a complex ecosystem of networks, protocols, providers and services.* One service could be available as (interactive) videotex for TVs or computers, and as (non-interactive) teletext broadcasted as real teletext or as video (so called in-vision). The boundaries between videotex, teletext and ASCII-based services, seems to have been so blurry in Hong Kong that it didn’t even make sense to use this terminology. Networks, providers, services, videotex, teletext, telex, pagers, TV-broadcasts, datastreams… Who is doing what where? Read this to join the confusion.
🡆 More examples of Asian teletext services
Teletext in the Middle East
I haven’t researched this area very well. But Israel launched a teletext service in 1986. Gulfax in the United Arab Emirates offered teletext in Arabic in the 1980s* and in English possibly in the 1990s.* Egypt and Iran had teletext for sure, and the pan-Arabic tv-channel MBC was broadcasting teletext in Arabic.* Jordan had something, possibly only in-vision. Kuwait, Oman and Syria possibly offered teletext as well. If you know anything more about Middle Eastern and/or Arabic teletext, please get in touch. Also see this.
Elsewhere
Oceania had teletext in Australia and New Zeeland. Africa had teletext in South Africa and possibly in Burkina Faso, Malawi and Morocco. In South America I’ve only managed to confirmed teletext in Brazil, but it was possibly available in other countries too.
More information is available in my list of teletext/videotex services.
Teletext standards and names
The CCIR defined the following standards in 1986. The countries listed below have adopted the standards according to ITU* (1998) and Video Demystified* (2005, page 178) , but it is unclear to what extent it was used. As far as I can understand, these standards include both the display and the transmission.
- A – Antiope (France, Colombia, India), transmitted with Didon (p.4)
- B – World System Teletext (Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, (West) Germany, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia)
- C – NABTS (USA, Canada, Brazil) typically displayed with NAPLPS
- D – JTES (Japan)*
World System Teletext Level 1.5 from 1981 is still the most widely used standard for teletext, despite numerous new enhanced teletext standards over the years, sometimes called HiText.*** The most recent one in Europe is Level 3.5 from 1997. So-called digital teletext such as NTL’s Digital Plus (UK, 2000) and more recent incarnations for the HbbTV, are perhaps the pinnacle of the “attractive” teletext that ETR outlined with HiText – and they do indeed offer some very cool potentials for text graphics. However, classic teletext is apparently hard to top, and even in the 2020’s it is used daily by 10-15% in several countries in Western Europe. (see below)
Most countries call it teletext, but there are exceptions. In Scandinavia they often go by Text-TV, in Germany and Switzerland it is sometimes called videotext, Italy calls it televideo, and in Iceland it’s called textavarp (text broadcast).
What about all the smut?
There is no lack of x-rated material on teletext, which might come as a surprise to some, given the rudimentary graphics. I’m not sure if it’s mainly a European thing, but over here commercial teletext channels have loads of explicit ads for dating, sexy chat and phone services, etc. A Polish ad from circa 2010 even seems to push this as a key selling point.
🡆 All x-rated teletext posts in this blog
🡆 Teletext Babez by drx
🡆 Polish ad for teletext (if not fake?)
Misc
- VIdeotex terminals at terminals-wiki.org >>
- Videotex terminals photographed by Klaus Nahr (scroll down) >>
After the fall of Antope and NABTS in USA, there was a new attempt.
Elektra teletext.. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1721508
In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act became law and required that TV programmes included subtitles for deaf people although it did not specify that closed captioning should be used rather than teletext.
Zenith decided that it would not be practical to redesign their TVs to have both a teletext decoder and a closed captioning decoder so decided to eliminate the teletext decoder from their 1993 range of TVs. This effectively ended teletext in the US in 1993 and the Electra service also shut down that year.
source
C64 PETSCII by Skyhawk, 2019-2024. BBBs mentioned: The Hidden, Antidote, The Boar’s Head Tavern.
Image-to-text conversions made in Chafa by its author, Hans Petter Jansson, 2025. The first two use the Terminus font and the bottom two use Blapinus. The original Himeji image is 3.4 MB in the PNG-format, while the 200-column text version is less than 0.9 MB. A JPG in 90% quality is 724 KB while a gzip-compressed 200-column text version is 230 KB.
textmode.art by humanbydefinition is a browser tool that allows you to upload and layer images and videos and add effects to it. You can experiment with character sets and many other things. Work in progress.
Star Wars PETSCII by Daniel Browning in People’s Computers #1, 1978. We’ve previously posted the front cover, but this is from the article inside. Browning explains how to plan the image on paper, and then use his PET-software GRAPHIX-I or GRAPHIX-II.
BBS PETSCII, 1986-1993 (WIP)
Old Commodore 64 BBS graphics are not easy to find. A lot of it was probably never saved, and there’s not really any obvious place for it online either. So I was thrilled to get a whole bunch disk images from Sixx: more than 1,000 PETSCII graphics and animations! I’ve gone through it, removed duplicates, identified artists, etc, and captured it as images and videos. I’m not done yet, but I’m presenting it as is.
- Full archive as C64 disk images or captures (work in progress).
- Help and info is welcome! -> infoATgoto80DOTcom
Big thanks to Baracuda at c64.ch for helping out to find artist names for a bunch of acronyms. <3
Context
I got 22 C64-disks from my good friend SiXX, who thinks he got them a long time ago from DemongerX, who passed away in 2023. Dated works range from 1986 to 1993, and most of them are probably from USA. Canada is represented, and a few other countries (Germany, Turkey, Denmark, Sweden..).
A majority of it seems to be BBS-stuff. Some of it is clearly scene-related (wares mostly, I think) and some is not. Online services like QuantumLink (which later became AOL) are mentioned, so some of the graphics could have apperared there. Sometimes the graphics were released as executable files, like CG-Slides. And perhaps some of the graphics were made offline and not part of any scene at all, who knows?
These graphics were almost certainly typed by hand, character by character, on a Commodore 64/128. No mouse, and maybe not even basic copy paste functions.
Although I call this PETSCII graphics, the BBS-world prefers the term C/G, which is short for either Color Graphics, Commodore Graphics or Character Graphics. More on that towards the end.
On screens and ads
The opening screens of a BBS are sometimes called ‘on screens’ on the disks, so I’ll go with that. Some of the images below are are probably ads posted on other boards – it’s hard to say. If you want more of these, you can search the archive for BBS.
Note that the captions contain links (in bold text).
Multiscreen elite
There’s a handful of multiscreen graphics for scene boards, listed on CSDb as either illegal or warez related. I’ve stitched them together as single images, and they remind me a lot of ANSI graphics from the early 1990s. In fact, even in contemporary ANSI it’s quite common to see these angry faces, skulls and swords.
Life sucks, abandon all hope
Yeah let’s head deeper into the teenage darkness!
Subs and sysops
Bulletin boards are often organized in subs (sub boards) for things like music, art, sports and movies. Some of the subs are open to anyone, whereas others are more closed, like an elite sub.
The BBS called Cob’s Corner had a sub called War. This was the only place where vulgarity and insults were allowed, but in the war sub, everything was allowed. It’s an interesting idea to keep the crap locked away, easy to avoid. I wonder how well it worked..
The owner of the BBS is the sysop. At the time, they would’ve had a dedicated computer in their room to run the BBS on, since the C64 can’t really do more than one thing at once. When you logged into their BBS they could follow your every move on the screen, which is actually kind of creepy? I had a small BBS in the 1990s and I was sometimes a creepy observer, because honestly I was happy that someone called. But yeah, big happy sysop is watching you!
Sysops, like modern day social media, wanted their users to be active. They wanted you to call often, post messages and upload stuff to keep the BBS active. If you were only downloading things, you would be called a leech, or maybe even a lamer!
When you paged the sysops for a chat and they were not around, you’d be greeted with stuff like this, (and more exy stuff – search for sysop in the archive).
Users navigate the BBS with keyboard commands at a prompt, and the commands are typically listed in various menus. Here’s how that would look at Catastrophic Failure, which seems to have been a hacking/wares BBS in Florida.
Kids stuff
Okay, we’ve had enough of the dark stuff for now. Let’s look into the more naive stuff! There is certainly no shortage of comics, cartoons, dragons and spaceships on these disks.
Ok, perhaps some darkness snuck in there. If you want more in this vein, search the archive for comics, cartoon, Roger Rabbit, TMNT, castle, pirate, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, Iron Maiden, Simpsons…
It’s worth remembering that these images are after-constructions. They are 2-3 screens high and neither the artist nor the viewer could see the full image. Bad proportions are understandable.
By the way, I found a fun example of the divide between toughness and innocence. Someone called Snoopy ran a BBS called Snoopy’s House together with his co-sysop Heavy Metal. It had a cute Snoopy PETSCII. But it seems like the BBS changed its name into something slightly more sinister… DICTATORS OF DEATH! With suitable graphics. My guess is that Heavy Metal pushed Snoopy to the dark side, but who knows. Hey Snoopy, if you’re reading this, tell us your story.
Holiday greetings
There is a similar innocence to the holiday greetings. It seems they were around on scene boards as well, which surprised me somehow.
Here you can see an example of re-use, which was common on the boards. The graphics from Xenet BBS is based on the one from Inner Circle.
Politics
There is not much typical politics on the disks, but..
Funky type
Abstracts and patterns
Pixel style
Contemporary PETSCII often uses dithering techniques that makes it similar to pixel art. There is not much of that on these disks, but some.
Miscellaneous
Sequential vs static
You could say that all these graphics were effectively animations back in the day, because the graphics were drawn sequentially on the BBS, character by character. The speed depends on the modem, which at the time was between 300 and 2400 BPS. You can compare the speeds in this video.
Offline, there were other options. I found two programs on the disks that I used: CG Viewer (very slow) and “CG Edit” (faster). I also used Petvjuscii (2003) which is really fast, and C/G Animator (1989) where you can set the speed yourself in BPS. I also used SEQ Viewer (1997) that actually shows the graphics as static images (and is also the only program I’ve found that loads PRG-files).
Unfortunately, the graphics don’t look the same in all these programs. Sometimes there are small errors, sometimes big. Sometimes you don’t know. This was frustrating in the capturing process, to say the least, but sometimes it creates rather beautiful data trash. I don’t know what causes this, but I’ve heard that there are different ways to store and retrieve PETSCII data. I dunno. There are still files that I didn’t manage to capture, so if you’re a PETSCII PRO, get in touch.
Animation
I’ve been fascinated with these sequentially displayed graphics ever since I saw Poison’s demos some 20 years ago. They were made with the so-called notemaker software Letter Noperator. Raquel Meyers and others in my demogroup got really into it, did things like this, and released Movie Noperator. Raquel still works with performances in this field. And in fact, we are just about to have a Noperator conference. :-)
Anyway, these works are not just linear streams of characters. They use control characters for cursor movements, toggling upper/lowercase, clear screen, etc, to create animations. It’s not unique to the C64 – it has probably been made on terminals since forever, and there are ASCIImations, ANSImations and break messages, for example.
Most of the animations on the disks are not very interesting. There are a lot of stick figures in silly adventures that are hard to follow. Some of them are extremely long, I think the longest one is almost 20 minutes (although running very slowly). There are a few more “scene-ish” animations, like Chameleon’s work for Incurable Addicition below.
Here is a long video with some of the animations from the archive. The list of animations is in the description of the video.
Artists
These are tags and artist names that I’ve identified, but there are definitely uncertainties and people left out by mistake. Feedback appreciated. Bold text are links to CSDb, which suggests a scene-relation. I’ve included tag or name in the filenames for searchability.
][ = maybe Infernal, ]<]) = KD (just my guess), Alcatraz1, AceMan, Animal, Apeman, Axis, Batman, BT, Billy the Kid (BTK), Buckwheat, BY, Chameleon (Cham), Chuckisoft, CK = maybe Copkiller but more likely Captain Kenby (Ken Nakatsu), Cleetus, CN, Comteacher, Cronos, Crow, Cthulu, Dan Levine, Dansan, Dark = maybe Darkwing, Deaks, Deann’s Dawn9 (maybe not a name?), DEF of Toga, Defcon, Digahole (DGH), D. Ferrari (DF), DH, Dockter Delirium Tremens Ph.D, Dog, Dog of War, Dokken, Drakamen Aveng, Dragonslayer (DS), DW, Edward T.H., EL = maybe Elmynster (aka Elminster), Eli, Elwood, Exel is possibly this, FP, Game Gorilla, George Jetson, GD, Gregg Sperling, Grey Stalker, Hacksaw (aka Kyle Cantin) maybe here, HC, Hammer Joe (HJ), HK, Iceman, Ickabod, IM, Impact, Incubus, infinity, Iron Lifter, Jed, Jim Isaacs, Joe Weider, Jon Sy, Kez Iban, Kajun, Keith, Keith Nelson, Keytapper (KT), Ladybug, Lightnin’, Lord Catavision (LC), Lethal, Link, Lucifer, Mad Dog, Mario Lanza, Mark Ad II, Matthew Joseph Hill, McCoy, Megadave (DHG), Mike Wood, Mister X, Night Ranger (NR), Omega Factor (OF, ().F.), Paul McAleer (PM), Pegasus, Power Station, Preacher, Quicksilver (QS), The Ram, Rambosmurf, Ray (Kathy Ray Smith, according to Baracuda), Rev Bud, Rudeboy (RB), RD, Red Blazer, RF, Rico, Rod S, RS Software, Ruffian, RW, Shoeshine Boy (SB), The Shark (SHK or T SHK), Silver Foxx, Skoal Keep, Slickforce (SF), Socks, Sonny, SP, Space Kase, Spartan, Sttick, Styles, TA, The American Eagle (TAE, possibly only a BBS-name), The Artists Guild (T.A.G.), T-Bone, TG, TH, Thinktank (Think, aka Tankanimation), TK, Twilyte (Lyte, TLT aka Tragedy TRAG), TofA, TP, Trister, Ture Seven (aka Ture 7), Unca Scrooge (Unca), UY, Uzzy, Vector maybe this, Vision (short for Visionary?), Visionary (Viz), Wangbar, Warp Sled, The Wave, The Wolf, Xray, Yoda, Zeph, Zodiac maybe this.
(psst, maybe “someone” should add Lord Catavision and Yoda to CSDb?)
Groups and releases
There were apparently groups dedicated to PETSCII graphics, like C/G Design with members like AceMan and Ture Seven. They would have been contemporary with early ANSI art groups like Aces of ANSI Art. There are not many traces of C/G Design, and eventually they turned into the group Second Dimension with PETSCII-artists like Ruffian, Tragedy (aka Twylite) and Vizz. In recent years, the group has started to release C64-demos again.
Inspiral Design is another group that has quite a few works on these disks by artists lik Chameleon, DOG, Lethal, Night Ranger, Silverfoxx and Visionary. The group was not CSDb, so I added it. It seems like they were mostly based in New York, and some of the members were later in the hacker/cracker group Robert Morris Jr. Computer Club.
AISA was a strange find. It’s short for Atlanta Image Sysop Association, which makes you curious, doesn’t it? The sysops of Magoo’s Mansion and Hanger 15, both in California, were both members.
PETSCII is not known to be released as packs or collections, but there are a few examples on the disks. Shoeshine Boy, from Alameda CA, compiled Picture Disks with various artists (1987-1988), and Paul McAleer’s made a slideshow with his own stuff called Lo-Res Graphics. It’s not the best PETSCII ever, but the Picture Disks are helpful because they are dated and artists are credited.
Boards
Here’s a compact list of names that I’ve identified as BBSs. There are probably more. Search the archive for BBS-name to see its graphics. Links lead to CSDb, ie there is a scene connection. (I’ve uploaded graphics to them, unless the page was locked.)
128th Precinct, Acheron (sysop: Da Boss), Aftermath, Aliance #3 (name unsure, 619-569-8523) American Eagle (401-946-9152, sysop: The Eagle), Arts BBS (seems affiliated with Thinktank), The Asylum (possibly this), Attraction (Sweden), Barbary Coast, Bathroom Wall (312-756-3726), Bizzy Bee BBS (209-578-0435, mentioned in TINKTANK/example 1), Black Genesis, Black Nights (414-929-9188, sysop: Dungeon Master), Blitzkrieg (714-255-1094), Boardwalk, Bootcamp, The Casino, The Castle (sysop: Lord Drone), Catastrophic Failure, COB’s Corner (305)253-1494 (mentioned in tinktank/foreword), Commodore Connection BBS, Crash & Burn (305-238-0569, mentioned in tinktank/foreword), Deadzone, Death Dungeon (301-449-0444, sysop: Warrior), Diamond Back, Dictator’s of Death (sysop: Snoopy, cosysop: Heavy Metal, Digital Paint Palace (817-281-7009, sysop: Aaron Hightower), Divine Chaos, Down by Law (203-875-5454, sysop: Morrissey), Dragon’s Den, Dream land, The Dumb Board, The Dungeon (maybe this or this), Dungeon of Domination, Ed BBS, Electronic Playground (415-827-9193), Electronic Playmates BBS, Eternal Meltdown, Evil Island, Flight Deck, Forbidden Forest, Fone Company (919-983-8271), Galaxy High, Genocide, Godfather (312-894-3142), The Golden Citadel (602-486-8750, sysop: Lightning Jim), Grand Illusion (sysops: Starchild & The Beast), Great Lakes Network, Great White North, Hanger 15 (404-636-2136), Hardwired (sysop: The Possessor?), Hazard County (519-971-0391, sysop: Lucky), Hell (maybe this), Houses of the Holy BBS (519-971-0002), Howie’s BBS, Huntington Connection (sysop: Captain Video), Imaginations BBS (516-582-8814), Imminent Disaster, In Living Color, Incurable Addiction, Inner Circle, Interface BBS (312-403-0604), Jazz Club, Jesters Court (519-945-4730, see Paradise Lost), Ken’s Comic BBS, Knights of the Round Table, Laser BBS (see this), Last Chance, Last Wizard’s Realm (215-724-6912), Lord Vegas Castle (sysop: Lord Vegas), Lost Planet, Loverboy’s Motel, Magoo’s Mansion (404-634-6136), Member’s Only (sysop: Killer Mario, cosyop: Thinktank), The Midnight Flyer, Monster (Turkey) Music Emporium, Mystic Cavern, Mysts of Avalon, Negative Hemispheres (sysop: Rad Skater), New Age BBS, New Image (maybe this), The Normal Place, Nutt House (sysops: Slimbo & Kentucky Gal), Oasis BBS (804-461-2250), The Orchard, Outback-128 (708-366-0882), Outer Limits (217-398-3652, mentioned in mov.hole in 1), Paradise Lost (591-945-4730, sysops: Zeppelin, Jester), Pilot’s Associate (aka Don’t Panic), Pirate Busters, Pleasure Palace, Police Station, Pyro-tech BBS, Radical Transfer (sysop: Radical User), Realm of Darkness (431-0847, sysop: Shadow), Sanitarium (maybe this), Satan’s Hollow (TCM HQ), Scoreboard BBS, Severe Complication(s), Silicon Realms (209-754-5530, sysop: Joe Commodore, mentioned in TINKTANK/CG EDIT), Snake Pit (543-110, sysop: Mongoose), Soopy’s Doghouse (sysop: Snoopy), South of Heaven, Space Station, Stage Door (sysop: The Director, cosysop: Moon Rock), Starfleet Command (305-366-0132), Stargazer BBS (217-892-2753, mentioned in mov.hole in 1), Suburbia BBS (217-337-6312, mentioned in mov.hole in 1), Technodrome (Germany), Telefieds (sysop: Nomad), Terror Tower, Temple of Apshai (312-7366-6072), Texas 64, Time Warp (312-426-6292, sysop: The Doctor), Torture Chamber (sysop: Punisher), Totally Insane Warez, Trading Post (sysop: Ford Man), Tri Nebula, Twilight Zone (519-966-4520), Underground Network, Underwarez (sysop: Erradicator), Undiscovered Country (800-859-9698), User Hero (sysop: Thinktank), Warez Syndicate, War Zone (714-441-2210, sysop: Warlord), Westpoint (Denmark), White Stallion (813-654-4847), Wise BBS (maybe this), Wizard’s Palace (maybe this), Wizard’s Realm (312-462-8067), Xenet BBS (513-372-3373)
PETSCII killed the C/G-star
There is no mention of PETSCII on these disks. It’s mostly called C/G, which is the common term on C64-boards still today, afaik. I’ve had the impression that C/G is short for Character Graphics, but that’s not the case on these disks. It’s either Color Graphics (CGFILES.D64/cg viewer, CG011.D64/the casino cg) or Commodore Graphics (CG008.D64/huntington connection bbs).
C64-boards often have a feature to toggle C/G on or off. Off means that non-C64 users can access the BBS, so I suppose it’s more or less like ASCII? In Thinktank’s graphics for Catastrophic Failure BBS (TINKTANK/CF) the toggle is expressed as ASCII or GFX.
Lores is another term used at the time, for example in CG008/VISION AD 2 and Paul McAleer’s slideshow LORES ART. Elsewhere you can find PETSCII-programs such as Lores Draw and Lores Screen Editor Royal (Loser).
The term ANSI was also in use. The Midnight Flyer BBS is advertised as supporting “Ascii/Ansi/ColorGfx” (CG006/MF CASTLED). I’m not sure what to make of that. Elsewhere, later, ANSI is basically synonymous with C/G (the program SEQ Shower is aka ANSI View). The terminal program CCGMS specified ANSI in one version. Sometimes, ANSI meant actual ANSI compatibility with a DOS font and 80-columns, like here.
Btw, check out this anti-ANSI/IBM animation from 1986: Robosledge by Jeff Neilson.
Notes on preservation
Each disk has its own folder, to maintain the context of the original ‘curator’. I’ve tried to capture all files and remove any duplicates, and the files I’ve failed to capture are listed in missing.txt, if any. The start of the file names are the same as on the disk, mostly. I’ve added (author YEAR) where known, and I’ve sometimes added keywords and comments to improve searchability.
The images are frozen documentations of something that were effectively animations, as mentioned before. They are also cleaned up. For example, there are graphics that were ‘recorded’ from a BBS, so you can see a message header just before the image is shown. It’s also worth mentioning, that the files on a C64-disk are not ordered alphabetically, so the order of the files can hold some clues.
Most of the files are in the SEQ-format, which is more or less standard. Others are in the PRG-format, although they are not executable. Regular PETSCII-viewers can’t read them. SEQ Viewer displays them, but only as static images so animations don’t work.
Issues
Files that are named in lowercase have incorrect resolution and JPG-compression. Most of them have been replaced with correct files, named in uppercase, but not all. The correct ones were captured with VICE 2.2 in double resolution, with the Ptoing palette.
Someone should really make the ultimate PETSCII viewer! How about a browser software that takes D64-files and outputs PNG and MP4? It should read SEQ and PRG, handle MCI-commands, display the files as animations or static images, allow for different speeds and feature a toggle for lower and uppercase. Who’s gonna make it happen? :-)
I don’t know how to show animations saved as PRG-files.
I’m not sure if all the graphics have been captured in full. It is possible that I’ve only captured parts of a picture, when it was in fact an animation or multiscreen graphics.
Some files seem to contain so called MCI-commands for BBS-systems like C*Base. CG003/ANIM is an animation in colour, and CG003/ANIM1 is a monochrome version of the same animation, but it contains £X commands, where X sets the colour in C*Base. It’s the same with EXAMPLE 1-3 in TINKTANK.D64. On the other hand, S.CHAT in C-G003.D64 is in colour but still contains £X commands. CG Edit in TINKTANK.D64 by Joe Commodore reads MCI and at least displays files like EXAMPLE 1-4 correctly.
Btw
Todo
The main thing is to capture animations saved as PRG. There are many files like that.
Photos of houses in Tiébélé, Burkina Faso, gathered from around the interwebs.
