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This is a very good series if you want to build it in rust. https://os.phil-opp.com/

That minesweeper game seems to only use the vga buffer and that blog series explains that tech very well.

I doubt you'd be able to fit compiled Rust into 512 bytes, though.

True, fitting a game and a boot loader into 512 bytes is very impressive. You can build pretty tiny rust binaries if you don’t link the std library though. Check this out for some tricks: https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

That blog post explains the vga buffer quite nicely so you should also be able to use the same information when writing assembler.

The smallest Rust binary that does something that I've ever seen is 145 bytes https://github.com/tormol/tiny-rust-executable

(I saw a wasm one get a bit lower but that isn't really apples to apples)

The OSDev Wiki has a lot of information:

https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page

https://wiki.osdev.org/Introduction

It's about Operating System development, but these bootable games are really simple, limited OSes: They don't have much functionality, but they do have to access hardware in all the same ways, so a lot of the same rules apply.

nanochess guy has some ebooks: https://nanochess.org/store.html