is it possible to cut it down to 16kB?

lots of network cards doesn't support larger EPROMS, and i already have
lots of 16K EPROMS.

i got down do 23K .com (rom size is similar IMHO) with
SA_USE_CREAD=no (it takes most space, while network is fast and there's no
need for gzipped ones) and

CPPFLAGS+= -DSUPPORT_BOOTP -DSUPPORT_DHCP
CPPFLAGS+= -DSUPPORT_NFS -DNFS_NOSYMLINK

(no rarp, bootparamd)

everything else is default as for release-1-5 booters.

can it be made even smaller?

can interactive command line be turned off? (no waiting, just boot
straight)

any work for compressed images done? rom files are relocated to 0x90000
after start anyway, so it should be easy.

first test with mscompress utility (decompressor can be fit in about 100
bytes of 16-bit asm) shows it fits in 16K.

i could help writing it, but have no hardware to test