Ever wondered what ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’ entirely in ASCII looks like? Well now you can. All you need is Windows XP, a bag of popcorn and to simply follow the instructions below:
- Click on Start
- Then click on Run
- Once the command prompt has loaded up (yes that ugly black box that you thought you’d never see again), type
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl - Hit the Enter key
And sit back, relax and let the force be with you!
Have you found any interesting How-To’s and Gadget Hacks. If so then don’t be greedy and share it with us in the forum here and if it’s good enough we’ll blog about it.
*UPDATE*
Thanks to all our readers for their comments on this post. I have admitted defeat and have hoisted up the white flag, please feel free to continuing commenting on this post and I will continue to keep the white flag up. But please don’t shoot me I have a flag!
11 thoughts on “Secret Windows XP Easter Egg – ASCII Star Wars”
How geeky, just watched it for a bit shame there is no sound but its genius. He must have taken ages to make that movie.
Indeed, I am not an expert in the ASCII field, but even I known the simplest thing can take hours
I agree it’s cool, but how can that be labeled an Easter egg? Telnet simply connects to a remote server called towel.blinkenlights.nl and displays whatever the server wants to be displayed. It will work on many systems besides XP, as long as there is ANSI terminal support in the Telnet app.
Hey John,
It is labeled an Easter Egg as it is a hidden extra but while not embedded in the OS software still needs the right combination to be entered, in this case the command in the run box.
If you want to know more about how an Easter Egg in computer terms is defined feel free to follow this link
http://www.compukiss.com/tech-talk/easter-eggs-high-tech-style-2.html
Hay guyz i just found an easter egg on my computer it’s caled notepad.exe don’t tell anybudy gusy!!!111
So far I we can conclude that you all (excluding Worby and John) are plain stupid idiots.
1. It’s not an easter egg (sorry Simon)
2. It’s not “genious” and it didn’t take “ages”. There is in fact a lib (aalib) that outputs video as ascii. Ergo; it took two seconds.
Whoa someone needs to cut down on the ProPlus me thinks.
Your telling me that it took two seconds to render a full movie into ascii format?
Can I ask what computer your using as it takes me hours to render my clips from 3D Studio Max into anything even if that is ascii format which I have not tried yet.
Hope you feel a little less crankey in the morning, or afternoon or whatever time you wake up.
Video can be output to ASCII on the fly, so this could *potentially* be done very quickly
Not an easter egg, all that is happening is you are connected to a remote service. This is not XP specific.
The video-to-ascii libraries out wouldn’t produce something like this. These illustrations are very simplified in a way the libraries wouldn’t be able to do automatically.
Well we could all agree that it perhaps took someone a “x” amount of time to wright the ascii render bit, but im afraid this isn’t an easter egg, if it is then surely typing “https://www.gaj-it.com/401/secret-windows-xp-easter-egg-ascii-star-wars/” into your browser is and easter egg, or typing dir/w in the cmd prompt is too. Im sure you could telnet into a load of servers and find “easter eggs”. Rendering clips from 3D studio max is a bit different to replacing a pixel with a char, also if you think about it to render the movie into ASCII on the fly sounds fast but the movie is say an hour or so long so thats how long it takes to render!
In response to just about everybody:
Not an Easter Egg: try doing it without Internet access and you’ll see that it doesn’t work, because what’s actually happening is you’re connecting to a server which gives you the ASCII art.
Doesn’t require Windows XP. This will also work in Linux, MacOS, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 7 if you install “telnet” (it isn’t by default). Hell, I can get it to work on my phone.
Not “aalib” or any other quick fix: this is all hand-drawn ASCII-art, as is obvious if you look at it for a few seconds.