System and adapter card for remote console emulation

A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the United States Patent & Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever. A system for providing, via a network, emulation of a console of a first computer system on a second, remotely located computer system on the network comprises an adapter card installed in the first computer system and a client program executing on the remotely located computer system. The adapter card comprises a local bus that interfaces to an input/output bus of the first computer system when the adapter card is connected to the first computer system, a graphics controller coupled to the local bus that interacts with the first computer system to generate a representation of a console screen of the first computer system, a network interface controller coupled to the local bus that provides a connection to the network, and a processor coupled to the local bus that determines changes in the representation of the console screen of the first computer system and that transmits information about the changes to the remotely located computer system via the network interface controller.