Awesome, do it! I love this kind of thing and do it regularly, mostly as part of the demoscene. I've written a bunch of demos for MS-DOS/VGA/Pentium 100 era hardware. All my own tools, almost all my own code (just using some standard library functions and someone else's mod player although that's on my list of things to write myself). All in mostly C with smatterings of assembly for speed (triangle rasteriser inner loops etc).

I also wrote a demo for 386/CGA hardware last year and I plan on porting that one to an 8086 as I think it is simple enough that it should be able to run on one. I've done a demo for the Sega Master System and I'm about to start a project for the Game Gear.

I also made a bare metal demo for the Leapster Explorer (an ARM-based kids toy).

I don't use AI for any of this because for me the interesting part is the journey as well as the final result. I want to learn how things work, and I enjoy writing the code.