>>36
Good advice. libtcod rocks.
OP could also try to write a Unicode roguelike (maybe restricting himself to Lucida Console characters). It'd have these advantages:
1. The advantages of writing a roguelike.
2. He'd learn about Unicode and how to do things the Proper Way.
3. It'd be kina innovative, which is something OP can otherwise hardly afford.
>>40
which is a mess to accommodate a broken operating system without real console support
While I share your hatred for toy operating systems, I feel obliged to point out that Windows' console >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> UNIX terminals, even if the console windows themselves lack the nice features of good terminal emulators such as Konsole. The console system is so much better. It's Unicode (if you know how to use it, but almost nobody does). You have real scancodes, not ^]]36;45lolM bullshit. You can use any key, as in any, as well as the mouse, fully. You can use Esc properly. You have colour attributes, not ^]51fag;33 bullshit. And everything works perfectly regardless of your terminal emulator (there's none), emulated terminal, terminfo, version, Linux distribution, and bugs. You don't have to support 45 different sequences in order to detect a fucking arrow, or load an XBOX, often non-Unicode library just to read what might be an arrow.
I wish GNU/Linux ditched absolutely everything about terminals and provided a new means for text-based applications; something just like Windows' console, where all output is written to and events are read from a file (with forcefully standard, efficient, simple binary commands for anything that's not UTF-8 text; maybe simply using Unicode private use characters to make it even simpler).