There is an old ASCII-based 4X space game called Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021. The map and everything is made of text characters. Has anybody played it? It seems to be a good game, but I never got around to figuring out how to play it, because I keep going back to SE4...
It is freeware and you can get it here:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=55