I’m looking up for communities or scenes whose purpose is making games that you play from bootup. Not necessarily boot sector games (stuff that has to fit in 512 bytes), but things that would behave much like cartridges in old consoles, where the hardware boots straight into the game.
Put another way, games that “are the OS”, either for x86 or ARM. My search engine-fu didn’t manage to find anything other than boot sector games and several Batocera guides.
This would be a good demoscene category. Sadly it looks like pouet.net doesn’t have a “platform” category for raw x86 (I think some of the DOS entries will be this, but not all) and I only saw one entry for x86.
At the end of the day: I think MS-DOS is a more attractive target than raw x86. It does a few things for you, but then mostly gets out of the way if you don’t want to use its features, and has better accessibility (thanks to DOSBOX) for most users.
Might be worth a try. Interesting that there’s some stuff for running on rPi 1 and even rPi Pico, which makes me hopeful for ARM shenanigans