wbahnassi wrote on 2026-08-17, 20:01:

I've read about CSMWrap (https://github.com/CSMWrap/CSMWrap) which can be the entry point if I can have the Surface boot into it with UEFI.. from there on I will have to face the challenge of sound and display. I hope SBEmu can cover the sound department, but I have no idea what I can do for VGA.

Very little it seems

CSMWrap also wraps the "SeaVGABIOS" module of SeaBIOS for providing a bare bones implementation of a legacy Video BIOS. That said, SeaVGABIOS is far from ideal, and many, many things requiring more direct access to legacy video modes won't work properly (e.g. pretty much all MS-DOS games, MS-DOS Editor, etc.).

With that limitation and no ability to install a replacement DOS compatible video card it would be a lot of effort for an extremely limited environment, unless you are looking to help out with testing and development. Since the Pro 4 is UEFI only the CSM shim would be required.

I can help with testing of course.. I was also looking around for other solutions and came across this:
https://github.com/gerben-stavenga/RetroOS

It mentions VGA emulation, but being AI-generated I have little confidence in how much it works. It mentions that for booting it requires GRUB, which is not available on a standard Surface Pro setup... but then again I have about 0-knowledge about Linux stuff.

It really depends on exactly what your goals are and what you want to accomplish.

Being a bit of a "DOShead", I maintain a number of actual DOS systems.

But.. on many of my modern systems I've pretty much "given up" on running native DOS.

Especially my Winblows tablets (SurfacePro3 & Digital2), mainly because:
- Finding "DOS compatible" drivers is impossible.
- DOS won't know about preserving the solid state storage in a tablet
(to be fair, DOS doesn't write nearly as much as Winblows, but depending on what you are doing you can still "wear out" storage)

If you want to run DOS games, DosBox is probably your best option. It goes out of it's way to present a fully DOS "gaming PC" compatible environment.

If your interest is more in running/using actual DOS - there are some pretty good "old PC" emulators:

DosBox can boot actual DOS - I do this quite frequently to test stuff.

I use PcEM - seems pretty simple/straightforward and works well (for me - yes folks complain that It's not been updated in a while - but none of my actual DOS PCs have been either 😀 )

I also use use VMwarePlayer sometimes (mainly for XP,Win7 etc. but sometimes DOS)

There are several others which are reported to be quite good as well: 86box, MartyPC etc.

Thanks Dave, the goal is the challenge itself 🙂 See if it is possible to turn something boring to an ultra-portable authentic DOS machine. As I said, DOSBox already runs very well on the Surface Pro4, so I'm covered if I just want to play the games themselves. But it's gonna be fun if I get to a point where I just plug in a USB stick and suddenly instead of booting to Win10 it boots to MSDOS.

It's become kind of a "does it run Crysis" thing for me.. Don't know about the others, but everytime I see a modern PC I wonder "can it be made to run native DOS?" 😅

My main Windows 11 workstation is an example of such setup. I plug in a USB stick formatted to DOS, and restart the machine... bam! MS-DOS with hardware OPL3 and SBPro 2 sounds. The RTX 2060 displays VGA to a certain degree, but I can put any PCI card for better compatibility if I need to. It runs a very large range of DOS software and has a real floppy disk drive as well (5.25").. it is actually my main DOS software archival setup, along with IMGDisk 🙂