Need help: ASCII art stereogram generator

The Game Room
1

I found this cool ASCII art stereogram generator. I downloaded the program but cannot figure out how generate my own stereogram. I will admit I’m not very good with this kind of thing but what I was hoping for was a way to input my own words or numbers kind of likethis one from Eye Tricks (but with ASCII of course).

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

2

It looks like it expects the input to be itself an image of sorts. You first make an ASCII “image” out of a grid of numbers, with the value of each pixel (character) being how high you want that pixel (character) to stick up. So, for instance, to make a letter C, you might do something like this:


11111111111111
11113333311111
11131111131111
11311111113111
11311111111111
11311111111111
11311111111111
11311111113111
11131111131111
11113333311111
11111111111111

That’ll make your letter two layers above your background. Make a file like that and save it, and use it as input for the program there.

3

Thanks Chronos, I see what you mean. I’ve tried several ways to insert that info into the ‘generator’ unsuccessfully. Could you or anyone else could shed a bit more light on this? Also after this info is inputted, how do you get the image to appear?

4

Perhaps it would help if you explained what you’ve tried to do so far? Have you been running it from a command line?

5

I downloaded the program.

First, have you compiled the program? There is no executable. I’m still pretty new to all this myself, but on Macs and Linux systems, all you need to do is navigate to the folder containing the program and type “make”, as there is a makefile included. I don’t know what you need on a PC.

edit: In case it’s not clear, you have to do that from a command line, or “Terminal” on Mac.

After that, the basic syntax is this:

./aa3d <INPUTFILE

INPUTFILE is the file containing the image and formatting info. In the folder that you’ve downloaded, there is a sample file called “pyramid”, as well as “logo” that shows you what the input file should look like. You can create this in something like TextEdit or Notepad or vim or emacs or whatnot, just make sure you save it as plaintext.

Typing the “./aa3d <INPUTFILE” will dump the output to standard out, which should be your screen. If you want to save the output in a file, type something like this (using the pyramid example included in the folder):

./aa3d <pyramid >pyramid3d.txt
(The format is: “./aa3d <INPUTFILE >OUTPUTFILE” in case it’s not clear)

The file pyramid3d.txt will now contain an ASCII stereogram based on the image and formatting information contained in “pyramid”.

6

Ah, I hadn’t downloaded it because I didn’t figure it would run on a Mac. I hadn’t realized it was distributed as source.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something advertised as being Y2K compliant.