Unfortunately this particular tangent didn't pan out. A week later I realized that a lot of BIOS only works in 16-bit mode. And I'm not willing to give up 32-bit mode. There's other hobbyist computers out there that do 8-bit and 16-bit, and part of the hypothesis of Mu is that we're still carrying the baggage of extreme optimization-focus in our computing stacks, and that our computers might be more comprehensible if computers in the 80s had more RAM. Dropping down to 16-bit would give up easy access to most RAM and nudge me like many others along a path of trying to squeeze code into fewer bytes. So -- particularly for network drivers -- it seems there's no way around some sort of OS with device drivers. So I'm kinda bummed out about this trail for now. The computing industry is busted in ways I'm not really empowered to fix. Perhaps I'll pick it up again in a few months and try to come up with some lowest-common-denominator set of hardware standards that all devices support. *VGA for screen, PS/2 for keyboard/mouse, there's something called the "em driver" for ethernet that's supposed to be widely supported, but I need to dig into it.