Add the facility to size the console and you've got the potential for a great library.

"Curses for KiXtart" anyone?

Returning the attributes as a seperate value would probably easier, as that would avoid AND/ORing and bitwise shifting and not everyone who does KiXtart scripting is comfortable with bitwise manipulations.

Is a blank area of the screen occupied by a space character, or a Chr(0)? If the former you would get away with strings, if the latter it would need to be an array of ints/doubles.