you could use a virtual X server to run wine on.

oh and the line is "The late Dent, Arthur Dent" 😀

Arthur Dent, as in the Late Arthur Dent ...

What I would like to be able to do is at a shell prompt be able to type something like:

> /usr/bin/dosbox ~/bin/test.exe /args
>

As a single command that runs the .exe file then returns to the shell ...

dosbox doesn't run windows exes.
and a virtual X server should work. Think harekiet runs his mircstats this way (but that is with wine and a virtual x server)

DOSBox wants an X server. running games without a display is pretty useless and DOSBox it's functionality is targeted at games.

You might want to consider carefully whether you want to run dos apps, or windows apps on Linux. There is a bit of difference.

If you just want dos apps, dosemu(not xdosemu!) will run from a console without X.
http://dosemu.sourceforge.net/
It's been a long time since I've used it, so I can't say much about it. Depending upon what you want to do, it is a lot more tricky to set up than dosbox.
Looking at the man page, there is an argument "-dumb" that might do what you want, but beyond that I'm not sure I can say anything else.

If you want to run Windows apps on Linux using Wine, I have heard about a way of it not requiring a X server years ago, but I think it's been removed from wine for a very long time. At least three or four years. It used to involve something called ttydrv, but has been apparently replaced with some sort of "null display driver".
As far as I can tell, if the app doesn't need any graphics, it won't need the X server, but if it does, then you will need to have an X server.
But I don't think you can change wine's behavior much. I do not think that you can set up wine so that it will not require graphics for a program that requires graphics.

You can run Windows console applications from Wine by using the wineconsole command from any shell. So you would use:

> wineconsole ~/bin/test.exe /args

This command does not require an X server running (it uses ncurses for all output), but you will likely have real problems getting Wine installed if you do not have X installed. See the manual for more information.