5 ms·
Never heard of ansiplay.exe. Was it known
by Eduard 6y ago
Never heard of ansiplay.exe. Was it known
- skissane 6y agoI don't think it was ever well-known. The basic idea: if you've ever used Microsoft BASICs (on DOS, that was BASICA, GW-BASIC, QBASIC, QuickBasic etc), you might have come across the PLAY statement. It lets you play simple music using a text string composed of notes ("ABC", etc) and various commands (e.g. change octave, change tempo, etc). Well, why couldn't ANSI.SYS provide ANSI-style escape sequences equivalent to the BASIC PLAY statement? Well, it could, but it doesn't. So the author of ANSIPLAY (Julie Ibarra) designed an ESC sequence syntax to do this and then wrote a program to interpret it. (Unlike ANSI.SYS, it isn't a device driver, so it doesn't allow arbitrary programs to play music using escape sequences – but it will interpret these sequences in a file.) (Looking at how it has been done... the structure of the escape sequences defined for ANSIPLAY isn't really compatible with ECMA-48 / ANSI X3.64 – but I imagine the author probably wasn't familiar with those standards back in 1991 when this was written – back in those days, information on these standards was much harder to come by than it is today.)