Found LINLD and I'm able to get my own custom v2.4.37 kernel to load on an emulated 386 with 4MB of RAM! I had to put the root filesystem on /dev/fd0 since there's not enough RAM for an initrd.
Not sure where the source for LINLD is, I found a copy of the .COM file here: https://distro.ibiblio.org/slitaz/boot/