What does this software do then? ================================ BB is a high quality audio-visual demonstration for your text terminal. It is a portable demo, so you can run it on plenty of operating systems and DOS. Supports: dos (VGA + MDA), stdio, curses, slang, X11, gpm, linux-console Sound: OSS, Sun audio, SGI, DEC Aplha, AIX, HP-UX, DOS (GUS CLASSIC, GUS CLASSIC, GUS MAX, GUS ACE, GUS PNP, SB, ESS, PC-buzzer . How this all started ==================== Once upon a time we've (my friend Kamil and I) bought two old Herculeses as secondary monitors. We didn't know (at 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 a 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 converter that used a font bitmap to create an approximation 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... AA-Project ========== dT8 8Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb dT 8 8 Tb The Three goals of the AA-Project: 1. Port all important software (like Doom, Second Reality, X windows etc..) on AA-lib. 2. Port AA-lib to all available platforms (mainly ZX-Spectrum and Sharp). 3. Force IBM to start manufacturing MDA cards again. AA-project was started by Jan Hubicka. Back then just a few people knew about it. Then a new demo named BB had been relased to show the power of AA-lib technology. Now the project is freely available and anyone can help. Where to find BB ================ All AA-project related programs can be obtained at 'http://aa-project.sourceforge.net'. Support us ========== We decided to distribute all of our AA-project related programs freely (see COPYING for details). If you want to help us (so we could develop more such software) send a small amount (or a big one ;-) to the AA/BB team. In that case, write us for further instructions... kupsaf@feld.cvut.cz (Filip Kupsa) hubicka@freesoft.cz (Jan Hubicka) titania@horac.ta.jcu.cz (Mojmir Svoboda) toman@atrax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz (Kamil Toman)