I have a laptop that will not allow anything but UEFI and I must run FreeDOS… (or one of many other OSes that wont boot via UEFI)
Is there a UEFI Bios shim? UEFI thinks it is an OS, but It loads the BIOS boot block and runs it?
Is that even possible?
Actually, I do have a quite usable FreeDOS running in DOSBox on my Linux machine, but it’s not quite the same as running DOS / FreeDOS on the metal. Getting floppies to work as seamlessly as they do on a machine meant for DOS for example.
86box is a little different than dosbox in that it fully emulates the hardware. Performance might still be an issue in your case, though. I have an emulated voodoo banshee system for playing old games and it works great for my use case of supporting old glide games. My thinking being if it can support glide emulation that it would be able to support anything from the dos era. I could be wrong though.