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    I Tried Turning Games Into Text

    Acerola

    1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2024–2026

    YouTube

    18:18 · 572K views · Jun 30, 2024

    Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.

    Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.

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    4 comments from Hacker News

    1. @pjobAug 2025· in “Rendering a game in real time with AI”

      I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader: this video

      RecommendsView on HN
    2. @snackbrokenJan 2026· in “ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering”

      > I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other. [1] this video

      CitesView on HN
    3. @cchanceJan 2025· in “Yt-x: Browse YouTube from your terminal”

      Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) this video (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) [LINK]

      CitesView on HN
    4. @cxreiffOct 2024· in “Show HN: Screensavers for your terminal (Bevy/Ratatui)”

      Definitely something I want to do down the line... something like the Sobel filter approach that acerola uses in this video: this video

      CitesView on HN