That's really neat!

As for alternative charsets...these seem to work nicely on my NT box.

my @CHARS=map{chr} qw(32 46 248 249 197 206 176 177 178 219);
print "@CHARS\n";
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Not the most effective way of coding it, but convenient (for me).

I doubt these values will work on a *nix system, unless there is a console font that emulates the old dos charset.

Update: The effect is especially pleasing when I set the window to a 6-point TT-Luscida font, the window size to 201x120 (Wxh) and ($ROWS,$COLS) = (120,200);.