v~~ Nonfiction, 2nd-person account about real Impulse Tracker ~~v
C. 1994-1996, one of my high-school friends won some mod contests. His weapon of choice was IT. Flying fingers making tiny tweaks, relistening over-and-over again in snappy DOS 80x50 text mode on a donated IBM PS/1. I don't know how IT got PC speaker emulation down, but they did IIRC through some sort of high precision timer magic such that it didn't need a sound card per se. Mouse support either ate up 4(?) characters in the normal 256 chars glyph space or it used the 512 glyph mode that commercial DOS utilities and the legacy FreeBSD text console mouse device used... basically by copying whatever glyphs would be under/around the mouse cursor to each sacrificial replacement glyph and dynamically drawing a fraction of a mouse cursor over each, and then writing the magic text chars to the text buffer.