ABOUT RIP
RIP stands for "Remote Imaging Protocol" and was invented by Jeff Reeder of Telegrafix, Inc. in the early 1990's.
Before 1993 or so, most online communications took the form of dial up bulletin board systems. Most of these systems presented options and information to the user in pure text form or ANSI. The pretty pictures of today's WWW didn't exist yet.
RIP made it easy to display rudimentary images quickly over connections as slow as 2400 baud. The images were not downloaded; they were dynamically created by the BBS server and sent to the user's terminal, running a software package called "RIPterm.," which the user also used to dial up the BBS.
Over time, RIP capability was integrated into some of the more popular dialers, such as ProComm and Telix.
RIP scenes were created using a program called RIPaint, made by Telegrafix. The graphics were vector based, had very limited color ability, and in the end could never match any kind of photo-realism. Realizing this early on, we decided to take a more fanciful approach to the cat graphics at KOTC rather than try to make things look "real." Since most KOTC scenes involved activity such as going somewhere or playing a game, we deliberately tried to make the scenes load as quickly as possible and not overload the scene. Most of our RIPs played well at 14,400 baud. At 28,800 baud, these RIP scenes wold appear (almost) instantly.
The KOTC scenes you're looking at may have been handled in any number of ways. Some scenes were essentially "menus", waiting for the user to click on an item to "go" somewhere else. If a "door" (program) had been engaged, then the program would serve RIP graphics to the user as an event played out, dynamically creating the terminal scene elements as the user made choices while playing a game, chatting, etc. Some scenes you may see here are only "half" scenes, since they may have relied on other screen elements already being on screen or planning to arrive later. We tried to integrate "animated" scenes a great deal, and they aren't represented here that way.
You may notice a arrow pointer in some scenes. That's because these scenes were created as jpg files by doing screen captures from the RIP terminal screen. In order to make the file sizes small, some of the RIP patterns had to be made solid - all of that was done in Photoshop.
RIP began with version 1.54. Eventually KOTC began to use version 2.0, which allowed us to use sounds. WAV files had to be downloaded in advance and kept on the user's machine for reference by the RIP script during a scene playback. Some KOTC places eventually were filled with sounds.