I downloaded the Shareware game files and used DosBox to extract them (archive.org had them compressed in a DOS version of the game). I found a copy of sdlquake and had to do some minor modifications to get it compiling and assembling on a 64-bit host. Also something about a null pointer dereference in connection with finding the local hostname.
Compiled a copy of SDL with aalib support. Copied it into the game directory, along with the sdlquake binary.
Ran "DISPLAY="" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib ./sdlquake".
That gave me quake in text mode, and would also run in a regular terminal.
That should be part of libc 5.3, which would be hell to install side-by-side whichever version you currently have. Not a rabbit-hole to go down lightly.
Maybe an old (2011-ish) Linux distro in a VM would be the way to go. If you want the effort. (I obviously don't feel like pursuing it myself).
Hmm, unfortunately I don't have the time right now, as I have to go. I'll leave my computer on, though, so if someone wants to help out, you can access it through tmate at https://tmate.io/t/f9Z36rpEkS8CSsHxwpZGlAl1d.
The few files I have are on a dir on my desktop, the superuser password is passw0rd. Thanks!
I think that the original squake was written against svgalib. So the ttyquake package contains a libvga that's probably a shim, translating the output to aalib.
Most Quake ports use OpenGL, SDL, etc for graphics, and won't work directly with the ttyquake files. Which is why I described using sdlquake to achieve the same effect, in my other comment.
Compiled a copy of SDL with aalib support. Copied it into the game directory, along with the sdlquake binary.
Ran "DISPLAY="" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib ./sdlquake".
That gave me quake in text mode, and would also run in a regular terminal.