573K views · Jun 30, 2024 · 18:18 · 1 HN recommender · 4 mentions · discussed 2024–2026
Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.
Why Hacker News points people here: Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.
“This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader”HN comment, 2025
“This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader”
Overview of implementing ASCII style as post-processing shader
I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader: this video
“the Sobel filter approach that acerola uses in this video”
Sobel filter approach to turning games into text
Definitely something I want to do down the line... something like the Sobel filter approach that acerola uses in this video: this video
ASCII filter for games as inspiration
Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) this video (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) link
Edge detection layered over brightness ASCII rendering
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other. [1] this video
