[cf100clunk]

I think it might be more MS-DOS specific than the broader ANSI Art:

  DOS 2.0 introduced the ability to add a device driver for the ANSI escape sequences: ANSI.SYS. Slowness, and the fact that it was not installed by default, made software rarely take advantage of it; instead, applications continued to directly manipulate the hardware to get the text display needed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code

Anyway, rhetorically, art (the payload) is art, regardless of the technical means or difficulty.

[pimlottc]

ANSI art was almost always published as sequences of text and MS-DOS compatible escape codes. That's what an .ANS file is, and how it was transferred over the modem in an interactive session.

And sure, this is art, but it's basically just a file conversion. ffmpeg has been able to output ANSI since at least 2010 [1]

1: https://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/trunk/ansi_8c_source.html

[capitainenemo]

It's also possible to output libchafa's nicer rendering with a broader set of characters using ffmpeg.