Found some UI mockups for a little utility project from 1996. In the spirit of my juvenile obsession with UI fiddling, I suspect I must have spent a lot of time designing and re-designing stuff and less time actually programming something useful.

Apparently this was supposed to be a tool to colorize ASCII logos to produce ANSI logos for BBSes and text-based title screens to be displayed in the console. Hence the name “ACE”, as in “Ansi Colorizer and Editor”.

Gadgets

Gadgets

Gadgets

Other colors

But, much to my surprise, I did implement something useful, and I also found the source code of the project, about 1,700 lines of Blitz BASIC 2 code.

Blitz BASIC 2 code

After some setup in the shell…

…I was able to compile and run the program. It’s not very polished, and some functions are missing, but it does the (simple) job:

Thinking up different UI designs probably still took of most of my time, as documented by earlier prototypes and an updated version – all of which look completely different, of course. The code wasn’t redesigned half as much. :)

Old 4-color prototype

Schicht im Schacht

8 colors

Another prototype

Redesign!

Char selector

New code