[anthk]

I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon 

or

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=kmsdrm

And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...

[antisol]

another fun one if you're in an exotic situation and don't have a framebuffer (or if you just want to have some fun by making your games to look worse):

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib

unfortunately it's only SDL1, though

[capitainenemo]

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=caca is more usable for games

[antisol]

Oh nice! How did I not know it works with caca?!

[capitainenemo]

Works pretty well even. I wish there was a libchafa variant, and ideally for SDL2.

I've even played SC2, The Ur-Quan masters fairly successfully in an ssh session that way. And Frozen Bubble.

[sylware]

This is what I meant: kmsdrm.