I think you are going to find more options in a 386 or 486 SBC (look for PC104 systems and ISA card SBCs meant to plug into a backplane). Any 8088 SBC is likely going to be a hobbyist project.

I was going recommend that Pocket8086 because I had recently been looking for the same basic configuration as you for a robot project I am working on and ultimately found that a Pocket8086 fit all of my criteria and was going to be cheaper in the long run than finding all of those old components and assembling something. However, the one item that doesn't fit your criteria is the EMS. However, there are two options: The Pocket8086 has an exposed header with all of the ISA signals on it. An EMS card could be added that way.

A few other cheap sources are Wyse thin clients and Oasys kitchen controllers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Actb0Pwm8zg).

I have put to use many of the surplus Wyse thin clients for DOS applications at work (that didn't require ISA cards)

Consider getting a pc104 based SBC.

The PC104 standard formfactor is *GEARED* toward small, modularized industrial PCs.

For instance, this one off ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/136142147119?_skw=pc … 7Thh5OdZg&pfm=0

It should have ZERO problems running freedos with jemmex, and has all the ports you need.

(Here's it's user manual)
https://advdownload.advantech.com/productfile … _manual_Ed3.pdf

Not suggesting you just go with that though, DO price shop and look around.

This is only meant to point you toward the correct offerings for what you are looking for.

That offer is a 'more or less pentium II/III class' pc104 with all the pigtails you need, and with expandable memory via the dimm slot on the bottom.

EMS memory can be provided from XMS memory (on the dimm) with jemmex.

It has pigtails for a buttload of ports, and has your IDE connector for your DOM.

You will find lots of such offers in this form factor.

Go shopping. Pick one you like.

Retroplayer wrote on 2025-08-26, 23:52:

I think you are going to find more options in a 386 or 486 SBC (look for PC104 systems and ISA card SBCs meant to plug into a backplane). Any 8088 SBC is likely going to be a hobbyist project.

I was going recommend that Pocket8086 because I had recently been looking for the same basic configuration as you for a robot project I am working on and ultimately found that a Pocket8086 fit all of my criteria and was going to be cheaper in the long run than finding all of those old components and assembling something. However, the one item that doesn't fit your criteria is the EMS. However, there are two options: The Pocket8086 has an exposed header with all of the ISA signals on it. An EMS card could be added that way.

EMS memory doesn't have to be special hardware. The LIM 4.0 driver doesn't even need a contiguous 64K page frame, but it does need four 16K free blocks somewhere between 640K and 1024K. I know there are some implementations of EMS that don't need 16K blocks. IIRC there's one that can work with pieces as small as 2K.

But on boards with a lot of built in peripherals their access is thrown into the HMA willy-nilly so even if there's 64K free it's in too small pieces or just uses up so much of the space that there isn't 64K not mapped for accessing built in peripherals. Laptops are especially bad for this.

Even if you have a hardware EMS card it's going nowhere without that 64K free in HMA.

The board I made an example of has this to say about its 1mb memory map in its manual.

The ethernet rom is only 16k in size, but the 'free'/'unused' area in the adapter rom region is at least one full 64k segment (D000-EFFF is larger than you need by about double) plus a little bit more, between CC00 and CFFF.

The ethernet rom can be disabled, per the manual.

The EBCD (area between E000 and EFFF 'reserved for post' per the adendum )can be relocated to XMS memory above 1mb if you use emm386 or jemmex, by supplying the right flag.

The ethernet pxe bios might still be useful, in that it can be leveraged by compact universal dos packet drivers, and thus be a useful means of pushing tapes to this machine. Ymmv.

This means it can easily give full EMS 4.0 with a full 64k pageframe, AND a modest bit of upper memory blocks for device drivers.

Again, offers are out there.

Go shopping. Read the manuals. Make a smart choice. 😁