In retrospect, thinking about the end problem, he really should have written a custom front-end that used SSH (or TLS) and a custom protocol to remotely send in

In retrospect, thinking about the end problem, he really should have written a custom front-end that used SSH (or TLS) and a custom protocol to remotely send input and receive telemetry, as most term emus don't support this kind of behavior. It could still be a TUI, but it'd be local and use evdev. What'd be nice is then you could actually use a joystick if you had one ^_^