Posted by Peter Sansom on 13/03/2021 07:41:38:
I would recommend the free VMware client. Install is easy, available for most OS's.
Just install DOS in it, once working make a backup and it is easy if you have issues.
This Instructable describes how to install MS-DOS 6 on VMWare. Not too difficult.
If the functionality is required long term I recommend finding alternatives that don't depend on MS-DOS. MS-DOS is done for unless someone writes an emulator or a virtual machine to support it and keeps them up-to-date. They exist, but there are no guarantees a particular DOS program will run on them, and demand for DOS is gradually withering away.
For example, I see it's no longer possible to run MS-DOS on Virtualbox because Virtualbox have dumped their support for floppy format. Not difficult to write an emulator to run MS-DOS programs, but it's tricky to support some of the hardware they use, like parallel & serial ports, real or virtual floppy discs, dongles, and network cards, etc. It's a lot of effort for a falling minority of users. Even some modern technologies like CD-ROM are fading away, best not depend on them either.
Lathes outlive their owners, but a twenty year old computer is an antique, very much entering 'you can't get the parts guv' territory! Computers age in dog years!
Dave