I have been working on a shell / launcher for the monochrome z80 series of calculators. It is based around two main things: 42maelstrom's Custom Menu and Zeda's Temp Proger. My goal was to make a shell that never writes anything to the Archive memory so it does not cause any GarbageCollect messages (except if the user selects Archive or Unarchive). However, while it does do that, it comes with some disadvantages. For example, it does not autodetect programs. There is a config file for adding new programs to the menu. However, this means that programs can have a "Nice Name" that shows up in the menu. There is also support for Asm programs. However, there is not any shell support. Another advantage is that while a program is running the launcher itself only uses ~500 bytes or Ram. Once I write another piece of Assembly this will drop to ~300 bytes. This does mean that part of the program lives in RAM, so those ~300 bytes will be susceptible to RAM clears. There is not any support for subprograms yet. It is almost complete in my opinion. I may upload the beta to the archives later.

NICE
As a previous TI83+ owner, I can relate with how little space you got to work with in RAM and how much shells require. I think this is great because other noteworthy shells, such as DCS are geared towards the TI84 series and TI83+SE and have MASSIVE filesizes.

As a fellow shell creator, I wish you the best of luck and one piece of advice. Create a config editor, one that can auto-detect programs and add them. User Interface, is after all, an important aspect of shell development!

I look forward to the future of this!

The first beta has been released! It works and has a nice readme. It is really small now that I look at it. It takes up less than 3KB of space in all. I am going to work on the config editor next. I will see how many bugs I can find after that. Here is the archives link: http://ceme.tech/DL1770