zASCII - Fullscreen post-process ASCII effect

A fullscreen post-process that turns whatever the camera sees into ASCII characters, fast enough to run every frame and aware of the target resolution and the character cell size, so it looks right from 960x540 to 2560x1440 without retuning.

Look and detail. The demo renders a 1920x1080 scene through a 2560x1440 render surface, so the ASCII output is slightly over-sampled and reads smoothly while keeping the character look. Set the render surface to your native resolution for a true 1:1 classic terminal look, with coarser detail.

Make it yours. The character glyphs are individual PNG textures, so replacing or adding characters is a matter of editing images. The shader itself is included as readable HLSL: change the character colour, or sample the underlying pixel colour per cell to build an ANSI-style colour version.

Origin. The effect began life as a shader the author wrote for a Delphi game prototype on the Truevision3D engine, later ported to XNA for a video player with optional shaders, and now to Unity. It has been fast since the first version because that was the point.

Built-in Render Pipeline only in this version; URP support is planned.

Key features

- Fullscreen real-time ASCII rendering as a camera post-process

- Resolution-aware: accounts for output resolution and character cell size

- Over-sampling via a configurable render surface for a smoother look, or 1:1 for classic

- Character set as individual PNGs, easy to swap or extend

- Shader source included (HLSL), commented, ready for colour or ANSI variants

- Demo scenes included

Support and questions: https://community.digitalsoftware.se/thread-19.html

Discord: https://discord.gg/fyqtxZt

Publisher: Digital Software Publishing, https://digitalsoftware.se, [email protected]