I said, without thinking, “oh, just run FreeDOS under Bochs or something” when a Mac user asked about running an old DOS program.
Then I spent a couple of hours banging my head against a wall, trying to get it working myself … I mean, the emulators work, and I believe that FreeDOS works :-) but the combination wasn't exactly obvious.
Then, after some careful googling, I came up with the right combination. Instead of trying to use the FreeDOS installer, just pick up a pre-installed copy from the Free OS Zoo collection!
The Q frontend to QEMU is really good, so start by installing that. Then grab the FreeDOS image from FreeOSZoo, create a PC config under Q that uses the FreeDOS image as the hard-drive, and boot it!
There are loads of OS images in there … I'm considering Plan9, I really am :-)