What does this software do then?
================================

BB is a high quality audio-visual demonstration for your text terminal. It is
a portable demo, so you can run it on plenty of operating systems and DOS.

Supports: dos (VGA + MDA), stdio, curses, slang, X11, gpm, linux-console
Sound: OSS, Sun audio, SGI, DEC Aplha, AIX, HP-UX, DOS (GUS CLASSIC, GUS
       CLASSIC, GUS MAX, GUS ACE, GUS PNP, SB, ESS, PC-buzzer .


How this all started
====================

Once upon a time we've (my friend Kamil and I) bought two old
Herculeses as secondary monitors. We didn't know (at that time) that our
Diamond Stealths 64 cards would become obsolete soon. The next day we
downloaded the logo of Linux Texas Users Group - nice silly penguin
looking like a cowboy! It was so exciting a logo... we decided that we
couldn't live without it and we wanted to see it at boot time as a logo
on our secondary monitors. There was a small problem - Hercules doesn't
support color graphics. So we decided to convert the penguin image to
ASCII art using netpbm tools.

The output was very ugly because the converting algorithm was
absolutely stupid. During the night I designed a new converter that
used a font bitmap to create an approximation table. The output wasn't
very good since the algorithm wasn't tuned so well. Many months this
small piece of code was waiting on my disc for the day "D". Meanwhile I
started a new project XaoS (a fractal zoomer) with my friend Thomas.
And then I got an idea: ASCII Art Mandelbrots! I was really impressed
by the result! XaoS was faster, portable and looking much better than
ever before. I found a new way to go...


AA-Project
==========

                               dT8  8Tb
                              dT 8  8 Tb
                             dT  8  8  Tb
                          <PROJECT><PROJECT>
                           dT    8  8    Tb
                          dT     8  8     Tb
   
The Three goals of the AA-Project:

  1. Port all important software (like Doom, Second Reality, X windows
     etc..) on AA-lib.

  2. Port AA-lib to all available platforms (mainly ZX-Spectrum and
     Sharp).

  3. Force IBM to start manufacturing MDA cards again.

AA-project was started by Jan Hubicka. Back then just a few
people knew about it. Then a new demo named BB had been released to show
the power of AA-lib technology. Now the project is freely available and
anyone can help.


Where to find BB
================

All AA-project related programs can be obtained at
'http://aa-project.sourceforge.net'.


Support us
==========

We decided to distribute all of our AA-project related programs freely (see
COPYING for details). If you want to help us (so we could develop more such
software) send a small amount (or a big one ;-) to the AA/BB team.
In that case, write us for further instructions...

kupsaf@feld.cvut.cz (Filip Kupsa)
hubicka@freesoft.cz (Jan Hubicka)
titania@horac.ta.jcu.cz (Mojmir Svoboda)
toman@atrax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz (Kamil Toman)

