🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a situation where I want to have an Emacs lisp function
automatically call an independent non-emacs program that uses TERMCAP
entries (the curses library, actually) to interact with the user.  If
emacs is running under X11, this is no problem, as I can spawn off an
xterm in which to run the program.  If not, though, I'm not sure what to
do.  I've tried the terminal-emulator package, and was not very happy
with it, as it lacked such basic things as reverse video highlighting.

I remember that this kind of thing was very easy with Gosling (Unipress)
emacs -- there was a lisp primitive that would cause Emacs to execute a
recursive interactive subshell, and when the subshell exeucted Emacs
would resume & redraw the screen.  Gnu Emacs is, as far as I can tell,
much more powerful than Gosling emacs, so surely there is some way to do
this?   (For the record, "call-process" does almost exactly what I want,
except that the applications get called with the terminal in a state so
peculiar that not even the "reset" command can save it.)  Any ideas?