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First things first, I had to get root on this thing, and someone had already figured out how to do it.
There is just an invaluable resource for these things at the forums of www.linux-hacker.net, I still stop in every now and then to see what people are doing with these. Now that I had root, I could really explore thier custom built qnx distro. It actually is pretty complex for a 16mb system, and if I didn't have such blatently evil plans for this, I would have kept it as is, and only added a few features. After 2 weeks or so, I decided to go for gold. I bought a used 10 gig laptop hd and parts to make an IDE cable. I knew that my revision of the bios wouldn't allow me to actually boot from the new drive, so I had to either flash my own chip, or buy one from Jack at badflash.com. 
See the Blue-Green (aquamarine) spot on my reference illustration. As you can see, the cmos is socketed and is exactly the same kind as was on my FIC-SD11 Athlon mobo, so I'd decided to flash it there. Which also meant I'd have to remove the glue that they had sealed the chip to the socket with. I spent a long time being careful with a dental pick, gently chipping away the glue until I could finally lift out the cmos chip. To flash this to the old revision, I made 3 floppies and prepared my FIC board. 1 floppy with a bootable DOS image, 1 with AWDFLASH.EXE, and another one to store the bios images on. I then removed all my cards and the CMOS chip. I wrapped the cmos chip with dental floss on its four corners and lightly put it back in the socket. In enough to make good contact, but loose enough to pull out fairly easy. I then booted to the DOS floppy and pulled out the cmos from the running system. Yes, that's right. I removed the cmos chip from the motherboard while it was running. Talk about being nervous. Then I carefully placed the Iopener's CMOS chip in its place with the same dental-floss tecnique. Even more tension. Then I flashed the bios with AWDFLASH, and powered down the system. *whew* 
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