ehutch79 parent
Why?
From the project page: "Boot FreeDOS, Windows XP, and Windows 7"
Additionally, it was just 3 years ago that memtest86plus finally got a UEFI version. That was painful for a few years there. (Though the 4GB RAM limit would have made this not an ideal solution.)
I'm sure there are other such self-hosting utilities that haven't been and may not be ported/rewritten to work under UEFI.
The two reasons I can think of: to run legacy or educational operating systems. There are going to be limitations to what can be supported, but simply getting the OS to boot is part of the battle. It would also be useful for those who want to experiment with operating systems by creating their own. Yes you can do that without BIOS support, but there are many old tutorials floating around that depend upon BIOS support. The BIOS was also created as a primitive hardware compatibility layer, so it will provide basic support for things like I/O.
DOS. Can’t think of any other reason.
You get better DOS emulation with DOSBox, rather than trying to make the modern peripherals work on a CSM / BIOS system.
DOSBox doesn't give access to real hardware. DOSemu doesn't run well on 64-bit machines. If you need unfettered hardware access, FreeDOS on the bare machine is the best option.
Actually it does give some. I'm using old ham radio software like CT9 under Windows 64-bits using DOSBox-X, with the parallel port configured in pass-through mode. DOSBox-X supplies a specific driver for this kind of direct hardware access. Of course not everything will work that way.