ANSI Art
Ansi Art is a special art created by using the keyboard characters with the maximum possible use of 16 colors.
These Ansi “Pictures” can be viewed in a simple terminal without any need for windows software.
Ansi History
Historically, ANSI art was created by BBSes having no graphical capabilities, thus using the keyboard characters (code page 437) and the limited 16 colors of the terminal in order to show more pleasing “graphics” to the user accessing the BBSes.
Since then different “hacker” groups began to create ANSI art for the enjoyment of the public and the ANSI wars began where each group attempted to create the most beautiful ANSI art.
Sixteen Colors Archive
Sixteen Colors organization attempts to gather all of ANSI art created since the early nineties.
The ANSI arts were packed as ANSI packs and 16c has gathered them all.
Their archive is now live on Github, and is organized by year.
16c Archive Problem
The 16c archive is amazing, but the problem with it is that it is huge , it currently holds more than 4.5gb of ANSI art!
Downloading so much data is problematic on many cases, thus the need for a downloader for the archive with the capability to have a resumable download, and even to download just a specific year of ANSI packs.
16c Archive Downloader
In order to overcome the huge size obstacle I have created this small utility which downloads the whole 16c ANSI archive, if some downloads fail then the next run just skips the downloaded files and attempts to download only those which failed.
In the process it generates a good log which shows the downloads and fails (if fails exist).
There is also the option to download specific years of ANSI packs by specifying them in the command line.