Limitations and known issues
This page contains the known but unfixable problems that may occur using RetroTxt.
Unsupported text formats
Micro-computer era, non-standard ASCII are not supported.
Binary formats such as .xb and .bin are not usable as browsers refuse to display unidentified file data in a tab.
Creating motion and animations would require a considerable amount of programming work for little reward. It would be a massive hit to browser performance, and most larger and more complicated ANSI would probably never render as the browser would flag the tab as unresponsive.
BBS era ANSI art
Many Bulletin Board System era ANSI art relied on an 80x25 fixed terminal with the cursor positioning to create motion and animations that do not convert using RetroTxt, including ANSI animations and music.
MIME sniffing
Browser MIME sniffing often overrides RetroTxt, forcing text files to download rather than display in a tab.
Chrome browsers can produce incorrect MIME sniffing results with the file:/// protocol.
Missing or invalid characters
Text encoded in CP-437 will fail to print the following five characters in a browser.
ü ì Å É ¥
One of the many issues with legacy 8-bit character encodings is that not all code pages use all available 256 codepoints. So while the original IBM CP-437 used by many ANSI art pieces has a complete set of 256 characters, the Windows CP-1252 used by web browsers only offers 251 characters, meaning five character glyphs are lost.
For example, fünf German for five is a valid word in CP-437 (OEM-US) but breaks in Windows CP-1252.
