Editing ATASCII (section)

==ATASCII animations==
The control codes in ATASCII are transmissible to other computers such as BBSs, and crude animations are possible. These animations, also known as "break movies", often take the form of short cartoons, and were a popular feature of Atari BBSs in their heyday.<ref>{{cite web |title=AtasciiTube |url=https://breakintochat.com/collections/atascii/ |website=Break Into Chat}}</ref>

Because cursor control operations are represented with a single character (as opposed to multi-byte sequences that were common in other schemes, like [[ANSI Art|ANSI]] or [[VT100]]), it is quite easy to make these animations. They can be created by a short BASIC program that captures keyboard commands, echoes them to the screen and saves them to a file.<ref>{{Cite magazine |last1=Ratcliff |first1=Matthew |title=Atari 'Toons |date=August 1985 |magazine=[[Antic (magazine)|Antic]] |volume=4 |issue=4 |url=https://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n4/toons.html}}</ref> The Atari also allowed commands to be typed and captured as part of its operating system. Of course this required care to get it right, but after a few attempts it normally became quite easy. The simple capture programs didn't have editing features, so ATASCII movies frequently had errors that were corrected by repositioning the cursor and printing over the mistake.