Thanks, all
Yes, I am one of the select few to actually take Bob Rost's class, and indeed have now tracked into the same grad program he went through, after doing a similar NES-related capstone in undergrad. I've been leaving Sack in the chr map partly as a nod to Bob when I have the space, and partly because for most of my text work, his original ascii chr is a nice starting point.
My website does include exactly the screenshot blargg posted for exactly his posted reason, but I didn't want to make everyone scroll through a dozen Panda3D and Mac binaries just to get to a couple NES tech demos.
Painguin is in fact possibly the coolest game to come out of the class, but it seems to break on newer (more accurate?) emulators. Is it okay on hardware?
Having monitored Nestopia's development on emuscene/macscene for a while, I'm reasonably convinced that it's a decent gold standard for real hardware. It's fun to hear this did run on a real NES, but I do wonder about the gray text. Maybe I need to do some redundant setting of the palette, or make doubly sure I'm not in grayscale mode. I'd be curious how HexS and Mandelbrot hold up on hardware.
Finally, re: a full vocal version, NO
Someone can crunch the math on how big a ROM that would need to be even at the DMC's lowest setting. As is, I think the clip is taking up about as much alone as the entirety of some of the other waveform channel data. I'll leave the classic cartridge full vocal treatment to Tales of Phantasia, thank you!