The ATASCII Mystery

A curious Easter egg found in the mass:werk vaults.

Last Sunday, something quite astonishing happened at the mass:werk office: I found a tiny app, named “img2atascii”, or more verbosely, “Image to ATASCII Parser”, on my server, dating from 2020. What makes this a curious case, or in any way remarkable, or a find, at all, is that I have no recollection of doing it, while it was, no question about it, indeed written by me. It’s a tiny app that accepts images of Atari 8-bit screens and parses the input to ATASCII codes in hex. I still don’t know what the context may have been, or what purpose this may/should have served. While I do find them fascinating, I can’t even claim to know my way around the Atari 8-bits that came after the VCS. Maybe this was answering some kind of request?

This is even more remarkable, even vexing, since I’ve usually a rather good memory. (At least, I do claim so.) But there’s no broader context, no project, nothing this would link to or which may provide some meaning to this that might transcend the rather restricted scope. — So, what a surprise and what an Easter egg, right on my own server!

Since you have to celebrate Easter, when it finds you (disclaimer: mind that there were times, you may have been sentenced to death for doing so, celebrating Easter on the wrong day, also a time tested way of not paying any wages to the crew after a circumnavigation), I made this a somewhat more useful app: it still does “screen OCR” for Atari 8-bit screenshots, but it now matches glyphs much more robustly and scans and converts any images to ATASCII codes.
In order to appropriately welcome this to the family of assorted little apps, there’s also a link on the “Lounge” page, where all those more or less useful programs live.

Try it here:

• Image to ATASCII Parser   (AKA “img2atascii”).