This reminds me of the winner of MacHack '98. It was a system extension which rendered the screen's contents in colored ASCII, in real time. The demo was Phantom Menace... it looked great. Miro said the important bit was only about 50 lines of C.

http://www.hax.com/MacHack/BestOf98.html

    Prelude> let developers = "developers" : [x | x <- developers]
    Prelude> print developers 

A Haskell tribute to Steve Ballmer

Heh. FWIW, could be simpler:

    Prelude> let developers = "developers" : developers
    Prelude> developers

You guys make it so complicated ;)

    Prelude> repeat "developers"

And since this is Y combinator news...:

    Prelude> fix("developers":)

A remember a few years ago there was this site that let you watch the World Cup in ASCII art. Now that was cool.

And there's telnet:towel.blinkenlights.nl, which has quite a bit of starwars ep4 as ascii art. mplayer also has a -vo ascii feature that will render any video in ascii art.

libcaca.

http://caca.zoy.org/