The attached patch changes the qemu northbridge.c to read the RAM size from the i440 PCI bridge configuration registers. This is mostly a copy-and-paste from the i440bx northbridge.c.
Unfortunately the current version of qemu does not set these registers, but I have patched qemu so that it emulates the i440 more faithfully in this regard. The LinuxBIOS patch preserves the existing behavior--hardcoding the RAM size to 64 MB--when running on an unpatched qemu.
I have submitted the qemu patch to the qemu-devel list, and will also include it in my HOWTO.
--Ed