
(I'm aware the uppercase text is offbalance, I will fix tomorrow, it's a 1-px error in my source pic, I just need to add an empty row)
Yep, I'm using the ASCII set from IBM page 437 I at one point took some time ripping/converting from the picture on the wikipedia article:

It has cool characters like smilies and borders and other cool jazz, for those who don't know what it is. There will be a PUTS routine that uses all of these characters and simply puts them to the buffer, and a PUTSF routine that using the control codes like '\n' to denote a newline instead of whatever code page 437 character replaces it.
Things are running along faster now that my silly RAM setup mistake was fixed earlier (I set it all up correctly -- but I couldn't clear ram with a ldir loop, the verdict was simply because my IM1 interrupt destroyed current registers (fixed, now the shadow registers are being used almost solely for the interrupt) and broke the ldir in the middle of it's execution). Hoping to have a decent set of syscalls done by the weekend!