View ANS files in your browser
The colored text art of bulletin boards and the art scene, which artists still draw. See a piece right here as DOS drew it, and save it as a picture. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your ANSI art opens as DOS drew it: its colors, blocks and lines in 8 by 16 cells, shrunk to fit your screen.
- DOS's 16 colors • iCE colors • 256 and 24 bit too
- Actual size, or shrunk to fit
- SAUCE • Title, artist, group and date
- Export • Save as PNG or JPEG
About ANS
In the 1990s, bulletin board systems greeted their callers with ANSI art: pictures made of DOS's characters, blocks, shades and line drawing, in 16 colors. Art groups released it in monthly packs, artists still draw it in editors like PabloDraw and Moebius, and archives like 16colo.rs keep tens of thousands of pieces.
An .ans file is text in DOS's code page 437 with ANSI.SYS's escape codes: ESC[ sequences set the colors, bold for the bright ones, and move the cursor, and the art wraps at 80 columns. A SAUCE record at its end can give its title, artist, group, date and width, and whether blinking means bright backgrounds, called iCE colors.
Filepeek draws a piece as DOS showed it, in 8 by 16 cells, or 9 when its SAUCE asks, with VGA's 16 colors and the glyphs of GNU Unifont, and puts its title, artist, group and date in Show details. Art in UTF-8, like a terminal's, keeps its characters and its 256 and 24 bit colors. It opens in the image viewer, so it zooms and saves as PNG or JPEG.
ANSI art
.ans
Format
- MIME type
- text/x-ansi
- Made by
- The BBS art scene
Inside the file
- Text
- DOS's code page 437
- Colors
- 16, set by escape codes
- Width
- 80 columns, or SAUCE's
- Credits
- SAUCE: title, artist and group
Opens in every browser
Filepeek draws ANSI art in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. On their own, browsers download it or show it as garbled text.
- YouChromeOpens through Filepeek
- YouEdgeOpens through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxOpens through Filepeek
- YouSafariOpens through Filepeek
Apps that open ANS
- WindowsPabloDraw and Moebius, ANSI art editors
- MacPabloDraw and Moebius
- iPhone and iPadNo app opens it
- AndroidNo app opens it
Questions
Why does my ANS file look like garbage in Notepad?
Notepad reads it as Windows text, so DOS's blocks turn into accented letters and its escape codes show as ←[ and numbers. Filepeek reads it as DOS's code page 437 and works the escape codes through, so the picture appears.
Can I save ANSI art as a picture?
Yes. Choose Export, then Save as PNG, with every cell at 8 by 16 pixels.
Where do I see who drew it?
Choose Show details. The SAUCE record's title, artist, group and date show there, with its comments.
What are iCE colors?
DOS kept a bit for blinking text. Art marked with iCE colors in its SAUCE uses that bit for 8 more bright background colors instead, and Filepeek draws them that way.