Running the text installer by typing "install" at the bootup prompt doesn't make any difference for me while testing in VirtualBox. The memory limit is still hit at the same size for decompressing the init image. It takes 224MB to boot to text installer, 216MB won't cut it.
Checking the isolinux/isolinux.cfg file on the cdrom, both "install" and "gui" use the same init.lz. So changing to text installer won't help any with a resource problem at this early stage in bootup.
Looks like unless the initrd has its compression changed before final, then we're looking at a bare minimum hardware requirement of 224MB ram.