How would you go about recreating this effect?

>>316978
There's a software called processing which kind of lets you run code on images.
It's pretty popular for data-moshing and pixel-sorting.
Lots of people make scripts for it and upload them for anyone to play with.
Just google "processing ascii generator" or something like that

>>316981
That doesn't look like an ASCII image, it's dithering.>>316981

>>316978
i think paint.net has some plugins that can gen this effect. monochrome, bright/contrast adjust, then the 8/16 bit dither effect

File: file.png (24KB, 761x512px) Image search: [Google]

24KB, 761x512px

I only know how to do it it GIMP.
Image>Mode>Indexed
You can specify how many colors the image should have.
And select "Positioned" under "Color Dithering" for that nice PC-98 look.

File: Michelangelo's_David_-_Bayer.png (4KB, 180x215px) Image search: [Google]

4KB, 180x215px

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

for our agency's new web page project i actually use web worker script this guy wrote to process a video to monochrome dithered form:
https://github.com/meemoo/iframework/blob/gh-pages/src/nodes/image-monochrome-worker.js
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12422407/monochrome-dithering-in-javascript-bayer-atkinson-floyd-steinberg

'e.data.threshold' variable for the various types of dithering is either a number between '1' to '255' ('128' for the somewhat "default" average) or a value 'null'. you can then save out the generated canvas element frame as a png or whatever.

>>316978
I could probably write a python code to do that to a .gif in a week, but it wouldn't be pretty.