I don't know how I'd turn code that says '_____ is in this room' into an actual object that you can see. Mainly because I don't know how to extract the original graphics/sound... and if I did, I wouldn't know what to do with them.
This was solved decades ago by people doing a tileset for Rogue; see also things like
rltiles.sourceforge.net/
Suffice it to say, once you've got the code, you need to tokenize the strings and map them to the tiles. Then you can do this.
Of course,you'd either have to use an already available tileset, or figure out how to extract the originals. Since the original sound is likely short PCM clips, MIDI, tracker tunes, or some direct-to-sound-chipset stuff, first you need to figure out what it was using. For the graphics, it should be easier, as it had to be converted to bitmap at some point. Point me at the original software and I could see if I can reverse enough of it to show you how/where it's stored.
