ANSI-CAM

Point a webcam at the world and get colored ANSI art back — then edit it, and animate it.

Status: released

Platforms: Web

Point a webcam at the world and get colored ANSI art back. ANSI-CAM converts photos, your camera, or generated visuals into grids of terminal characters, with sixteen-plus period palettes — CGA, VGA, C64, Synthwave — four glyph modes from solid blocks to full CP437 shape-matching, Floyd Steinberg and Bayer and blue-noise dithering, edge detection, background removal, and the usual brightness, contrast, gamma and posterize controls. Heavy conversions preview instantly at low resolution and sharpen as they finish.

From there it keeps going. A layer-based editor gives you pencil, fill, shapes, gradients, selections, sprite stamping, fourteen bitmap fonts and fifty steps of undo, all working in character cells rather than pixels. A live mode runs your camera through the whole pipeline in real time, records it, and does stop-motion: press capture to lay down a frame, and the last one stays on screen as an onion-skin ghost so you can shoot claymation against it.

The animation studio underneath is the real surprise — scenes, shots and frames with holds, a timeline, a storyboard, an exposure sheet, tweening in cell space, motion drivers for wiggle and cycle and delay, and a rack of twenty-one keyframable effects covering dissolves and wipes, echo, time displacement, phosphor glow, glyph particles, and chroma and luma keying. Everything exports: PNG, ANS, TXT, HTML, GIF, MP4, spritesheets, a classic terminal ansimation with a shell script to play it, and a portable project file. It reads old formats too, including .ans with SAUCE records, Durdraw and XBin. The whole thing wears a BBS warez NFO splash, which is the correct choice.

It is free, and there is nothing to sign up for. The conversion runs on your own machine and your work is saved in your own browser rather than on a server. There are no accounts, no payments, no cookies, and no third-party trackers. The privacy page is specific about the two things that do leave your device — crash reports, and video export on browsers too old to encode it themselves.