Misty

if you don't have one yet you gotta get an 80-column card

What version of curses does your GPU support?

Unfortunately, you either need to find a 3dfx Voodoo-Rogue or an SGI Indy with the NH "graphics" subsystem option. Everything else was a bit meh.

I know I'm in dangerous territory by treating a shitchost with any resembling seriousness, but I gotta say that "ASCII accelerator" absolutely makes sense to my mind as a description of "text mode" that all video cards used to have (and continue to support despite being all but obsolete). I mean, video cards had extra hardware just to deal with text mode. In the CRT days you could fiddle with the hardware registers to get nonstandard text display sizes and refresh rates. And it was accelerated! In fact it was insanely faster than any graphical text display like the framebuffer could ever hope to achieve.