All –                 On MS-DOS, it seems that ZORK uses an ANSI driver…not sure why for a text adventure, but it does. The machine I have runs DOS but has no video board – everything is piped over the serial port, and the ANSI driver doesn’t work. Does anyone know of a way to force it to work without the ANSI driver?                 ZORK does run, but it displays annoying control characters on each line. I was just looking for a way to clean it up and not need the driver.

There are programs like doorway that allowed both local console and remote serial port redirection. It was used for bbs sysops to allow remote administration of dos host. You can also redirect console over serial with a simple dos command that I forget.... but that is probably what you are doing. If your terminal supports the ANSI commands?