EMC question

Seems to be a few on here that know EMC quite well. I am starting to run EMC on an old PC and I recently got so far as to see wildly jittery step pulses at any speed. I don't know what's wrong yet, but it's so bad it seems to me RT isn't actually happening somehow. There's no way to run a machine with output like this, and I have some real debugging to do. Right away I have a question, though. I have 32M of memory in this machine. That's Plenty for what the PC needs to do, if I get rid of X. I don't need X to run a mill. Anyone know of an ncurses GUI for EMC or why it isn't around?