Monday, 7 September 2015

Watch ASCII Star Wars in Windows

Every one of us has watched Star Wars on television, computer or in a theater. It is the same movie with aliens fighting each other for galaxies and such stuff. There is nothing new in it. But wait, have you watched an ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) version of Star Wars and that too in Windows using telnet?
A network protocol known only to computer wizards. Well if you have not, then you must do it now!

There is a complete copy of Star Wars done entirely in ASCII characters that you can watch in the Windows operating system (or any OS that supports telnet). The only thing required to watch it is an internet connection; speed does not matter.


A Picture showing Star Wars in command prompt

To watch it on Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux
  1. Go to Start, Run. (Only for Windows users)
  2. Now type "telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter. Users of Mac OS X and Linux can directly execute this code in the terminal window.

On Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 7 and Windows Vista

Telnet is turned off by default in the latest versions of Windows. So, in order to watch star wars, you must first enable telnet by going to Control Panel › Programs › Turn Windows Feature On or Off and ticking both the telnet check boxes. After doing that, follow the steps given below:-
  1. Go to Start, Search in Windows Vista and Windows 7. On Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, open the main Start page.
  2. Type telnet and press Enter.
  3. In the following command prompt window, type "o" without quotes and press Enter.
  4. Now type "towel.blinkenlights.nl" without the quotes and press Enter.
If you do not need telnet anymore, you can turn it off.

A command prompt window like the one in the image will open with the movie being played in it. See the movie yourself. Did you enjoy watching this new version of Star Wars? Well, I did and know it for sure that you would have too.

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