Raspbian OS Trickery for ANSI "BBS" type host

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I have a foolish melancholy for the old eBBSes. In paticular Renegade. I know of ways to fooling Ms-DOS into thinking there is a dial-up modem on a com port when actually there is an ethernet or wireless interent connection. This allows one to run the bulletin board as a website. Unfortunately the visitors browser must be set for this. Yes we are talking old school ANSI too (love the challenge of it).
Does anyone have any suggestions of an easier way to do this hopefully from a pi? Obviously the pi would easily handle multi-nodes and with the ease of zero’s becoming cluster nodes.
a friend suggested creating a DOS for the esp32 since it has basic and the characteristics of old 8086 type systems…Rather use a Pi with perhaps a DOS emulator.
BUT if anyone’s familiar with converting ANSI imagery over to linux that would be Ideal. I am sure a simple host based menu & message system wouldn’t be too hard to make
and would relieve the issue of a guests terminal having to be setup for compatibility.
I have read of ASCII conversions but there are character code issues. If anyone has seen this done or something similar please point me in the direction. I would love to convert over much of my ANSI and still use my old “The Draw” program. Or if anyone knows must about running host through a DOS emuator let me know. To my understanding its not truelly capable of running the machine in such depth of device management being merely an emulator.

There is beauty in simplicity… and I really would prefer the speed that low mem ANSI type color graphics would give me.

Obviously the Raspi-config is in an ANSI type graphics. Is there drawing programs for this? I want to do more then call a window and color from code but actually draw art with out having to code each character out manually.

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If you just want to revisit classic-style terminal-based GUIs, you’ll possibly like Ncurses?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses

raspi-config uses Whiptail, which is quite limited: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bash_Shell_Scripting/Whiptail

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Thank you very much. I had found this enjoyable read of nostalgia :


My life rather paralleled this. So much so that it was a wonderful finding the raspberry Pi community, a place so many others remember the BBS community of yestur-year, or atleast bring or find a similar comradery from.
In a way I see my childrens rPi zeros and now pi3s much like my old Tandy 1000 was. A passage of new influence some how private yet not alone, finding others of like mind or interest. Watching my eight yearold guide my 6 year old through scratch or my 6 year old read to my 4 yearold and play the tech educating games of Kano desktop with her somehow brings me back to those early times I had with my best friend. I bought his TRS-80 for my first computer and he helped me with basic, what little help was needed at first.
My kids do use tablets and such, but they do enjoy their raspberry Pis. It is quite a different experience. One they obviously find more rewarding. Guides in hacking minecraft in python for my eight year old and so on.