BTAC

Bitmap To ASCII Converter (cleverly abbreviated as BTAC) is an experimental ASCII Art generator and was written for pretty much no good reason at all. Although the conversion algorithm was very computationally expensive (I didn't know/care how screwed up O(n³) complexity was at the time), the results were interesting.

I wrote this thing in C++ back in high school while developing font and bitmap processing libraries for MegaQuest (an RPG that I have been working on for the past 10 or so years). This application takes a bitmap image (either 8 or 24 bit) and converts it to colored ASCII encoded in HTML.

BTAC used one of two monospace rasterized fonts (terminal 8pt and terminal 10pt) to find a best-fit symbol for each block of equal dimensions on the bitmap; this allowed for the preservation of a fair amount of detail, especially around edges. BTAC also featured many different adjustable parameters to tweak the conversion process on a per-image basis.

I lost the source code for this application long ago, but I'm sure it would be too embarrassing to show to anyone even if I still had it. It was slow and ugly!

A butterfly...

A person...

A lilly...