Back in the early 2000's there was this driver/library to output any graphics in ASCII instead of framebuffer or whatever.

A colleague had a Linux box at home with a TV Tuner PCI card. We would SSH from the University's lab and watch TV-on-ASCII-over-SSH to the amusement of the people around us.

Sounds so simple and silly today, but it was a fun way to learn back in the day :)