SilverWarior has good tips. I would do 2) to hold 256x256 colored vertex array for the pixels. Render it into texture as a 256x256 grid, that's what framebuffer demo in nx is about. It might be a little complicated demo though. You can optimize it by having a boolean variable "minimapChanged". Every time you draw to tilemap it is set True. Then every half second check if it's True. If it is, then set it False and generate the minimap texture again. For actual map drawing you're only drawing 1 quad per frame. Change texture coordinates based on where the camera is.
edit: You can draw the whole map as is into framebuffer, if you want to make it simple and memory efficient. It will just take longer time to render. But then you can zoom the minimap with texture detail, depending on the texture resolution used on minimap. 512x512 would still only show you 2x2 area of 1 tile, but it's much more detail than 1 pixel.
And, what it means to draw into texture... Think if it as drawing the whole map onto your screen in ortho mode. Scaled exactly in area of texture resolution 512x512 if that's what it is. You should definitely test by rendering it on screen first to see that the boundaries are right, and then switch to render it to texture.
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