I was thinking along the lines of making a Roguelike a while back. What compiler are you using? FPC, Delphi, or even Chrome? With Phoenix the best idea is to emulate the standard console, otherwise you might miss elements of the style of roguelikes. Have you seen Copx's work? That uses SDL to render the text, and the interface alongside it is graphical--you could do something similar with this and have a square text area if you wanted.

If you're open to it, I can give plenty of advice on how to go about emulating the console window if you want it.