A longshot here, but I was wondering if anyone had a copy of ttyQuake, the strange conversion for Quake I that made it entirely ASCII. The original site was here:

http://webpages.mr.net/bobz/ttyquake/

But it won't let me on, and I can't seem to find it anywhere else. I'd kinda like to get this strange conversion to admire Quake's brown visuals in glorious grey text! So let me know if anyone has it.

I guess this is what you're looking for:
ttyQuake FAQ

And here is the working download link for ttyquake-0.4.2.tar.gz

What a blast from the past! I should try this out aswell ;)

EDIT: here's a mediafire backup link aswell. Just in case:
http://www.mediafire.com/?51bi6cclzyp94su

EDIT2: I think there's a RPM for a more recent version of the wrapper (since it says 0.9!) here, here.
ftp.pbone.net and ftp.sunet.se are working

EDIT3: Actually 0.9 that's the version of aavga, so the last ttyquake version is really 0.4.2!

Hey, thanks very much! I didn't actually expect to find it!

Now to fire up some ASCII fragging goodness!

EDIT: aww drat. Guess it needs Linux. Oh well. Thanks anyway!

You're welcome. Quake and id games are best played on Linux anyway :P
But his wrapper is actually just a bash script that actually tells your system to give the tty libraries precedence over the original quake ones. The game will use those and render the screens in ASCII, so if you can get a hold of those libs in Windows and overwrite the original Quake ones it should work aswell.

Anybody found a video of this? I would love to see it in action! The screenies look awesome.

I updated the libraries to work with glibcv2:
ttyquake-0.5.tar.bz2
(only 32bit!)

Only Problem is that I didn't get anything succesfull out of it... There are numerous Quake engines with added improvements and such but only few actually provide a svga renderer.
There's the original Quake 1 Source code I couldn't compile: http://www.quakeforge.net/files/q1source.zip
And the enhanced Quakeforge renderer: http://www.quakeforge.net/
Which gives me a "Fatal Error: SVGALib failed to allocate a new VC", and the console renderer somehow doesn't play nice with the x11 server...

Anyway. It's an other world if we consider Quake II. We have this: http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/
And you can get some ASCII goodness by setting SDL_VIDEODRIVER="aalib" before using http://icculus.org/quake2/

Was fun anyways. ;P