Art Packs

The BBS art scene published in packs: one ZIP per release, full of ANSI and ASCII art, a FILE_ID.DIZ as its manifest, and a group name on the label. This is font.lol's archive of them, 4,019 packs opened and inventoried: 141,646 files in all, 66,816 of them .ans artworks.

The packs run from 1992 to 2008. The font story sits early in that span: the TheDraw packs at the top level date from 1994 to 1996, the packs carrying nested TheDraw fonts from 1993 to 2001, the specimen-font candidates from 1994 to 2002, and the other font files from 1993 to 2003. Packs are cataloged here at collection level, because that is what the archive honestly supports: there are no per-pack pages, and nothing in this shelf is a download.

Packs by year

The trees and the groups

The archive keeps three trees: the main crawl and the ACiD and iCE mirrors.

Group attribution comes from each pack's own FILE_ID.DIZ or .nfo text where one could be read (892 packs) and from the filename prefix everywhere else, so the short forms below are the scene's own filename shorthand. The most prolific names in the archive:

The packs that carried fonts

Fonts are rare cargo. Counting every layer the censuses reached, of 4,019 packs, 12 carry TheDraw fonts, 39 carry a specimen-font candidate, and 94 carry some other font file. For these twelve font-bearing packs, a provenance pass over their own info files and the scene archive records has since replaced the census's filename shorthand with the sourced group names and release dates below.

TheDraw packs at the top level (6)

TheDraw packs, nested (6)

Six more packs carry their TheDraw fonts one or two archives down, as cargo inside bigger zips. The recursive pass found them; the first pass could not see them.

The designs themselves live on the TheDraw shelf, with a page per design.

Specimen-font candidates (41 files in 39 packs at any depth)

Whole .ans files that present as fonts, flagged by their file names and their packs' FILE_ID.DIZ texts. Candidates only: confirming one means opening the sheet and segmenting its letterforms, which has not been done yet.

The recursive pass added 5 more candidates, each one archive down:

Other font files (413 files in 94 packs at any depth)

107 of them sit at the top level of the 49 packs listed below. The recursive pass added 302 more at depth (249 .chr, 30 .fnt, 1 .fon, 4 .pcf, 18 .ttf), inside 45 further packs, all but one of them new to this list. The period-format pass added the last 4: Ascii.ttf, LCD.ttf, Pixel.ttf, gte437.FON, all four inside one diskmag's engine folder (cro0402.zip > cro0402.rar > MAG/DATA/SYS/), a Windows diskmag's bundled system fonts rather than scene designs. By extension across every layer: 268 .chr, 114 .fnt, 2 .fon, 4 .pcf, 25 .ttf. A caution from the census: the .fnt extension is ambiguous (Windows font resources and raw bitmap font data share it), so those files need file-level inspection before anyone calls them convertible fonts. The .chr files are Borland-style character sets. The yield concentrates in a few font-pack-like releases, uni-1293 and fl-pack7 among them.

What the census could not see

The nested layer is no longer part of the unknown: the recursive pass found 2,464 archives inside the packs and opened 2,456 of them, down to chains 6 levels deep. What remains unseen, stated plainly:

8 nested archives could not be opened: 4 by unsupported compression (PKZIP implode, method 6), 3 by bad CRC-32, 1 by not a ZIP file. Of the 12 packs the first pass could not read at all, 11 have since been inventoried by scanning their local file headers (bdp-0995.zip, bmb-0297.zip, bmbook11.zip, cia75.zip, l0p22_04.zip, mdn-9702.zip, mxt-pack17.zip, pur-0894.zip, raster_chapter_005.zip, rg-0197d.zip, trip0197.zip); those inventories are best-effort, their entries are not CRC-verified, and all 11 are art packs that carried no fonts. The last one, jasper03.zip, is not a ZIP file at all, whatever its name says. The 253 entries in other period formats that the ZIP passes could only inventory have since been resolved with period decompressors (unar, arj, lhasa, nomarch and unace-nonfree). Once the duplicate sightings are merged they are 129 physical entries: 58 opened and inventoried (2,747 files, 680 more .ans artworks), and 70 that were never archives at all, art and text files wearing archive extensions: every one of the 26 .HYP entries is an ANSI art file, every one of the 15 .pak entries is a plain text, the single .ARC entry is a text file, and 28 of the 30 .ace entries are ANSI art too (only 2 are real ACE archives). The layer's font yield was zero new TheDraw designs and zero specimen candidates; its only font files are the four diskmag system fonts counted above. One entry still cannot be opened: cro0102.rar, inside cro0102.zip. Its container ZIP has a damaged local header for the entry, which defeats listing and extraction; a scan recovered 33,720 of its 15.7 MB, but the first entry header inside the recovered prefix is corrupt too. It is the only uninventoried material left in the archive.

The pack inventory is not quite the whole census story. The censuses read each .TDF file by its TheDraw signature, and a .TDF can chain several font records behind a single signature; a chained-record re-check of every sighted file, walking the records one by one, found exactly one design the scans had missed: GUARD1-2, chained behind GUARD1-1 inside GUARDF1.TDF in riot1293.zip. The TheDraw census stands at 34 designs.

One thinner spot remains from the first pass: 73 provenance texts inside otherwise readable packs, almost all in the earliest ACiD packs, use period compression the census reader does not decode, so some group and date attributions for 1992 and 1993 are thinner than they should be. No font file failed to read anywhere, so the font counts are not affected.