Character Set Editor
A tool for redefining bitmap character sets — redesigning how letters and symbols appear — enabling rich graphics from text-mode displays.
Text-mode displays map each character code to a small bitmap. If you redefine those bitmaps, you reshape the entire visual appearance of the screen. ANSI artists used charset editors to create complex, colorful graphics on BBS systems. Demo makers did the same trick: by changing just 256 bytes in character RAM, an entire textmode or chunky-pixel display could be reinvented. The constraints of text-mode rendering (a grid of discrete characters) forced a different aesthetic, but clever charset hacking could achieve stunning visual effects.