[Japo]

I had the exact same setup you describe, except DOS 6.x instead of FreeDOS--a Pentium III with a Sound Blaster PCI 128 with SB16 emulation support. So yes a Pentium III is a perfectly fine DOS platform. However you surely realize that a Pentium III is not "contemporary" hardware any longer, nor a sound card with SB16 support. If you tried this with a slightly newer machine you may have got less satisfactory results.

Don't hold me on this, but the Pentium III may be the latest architecture with good DOS backwards compatibility. I haven't tried on a real setup, but VPC 2007 is appalling at running DOS games, and it appears to emulate a Pentium IV. I've heard that VPC 2004 was better for emulating DOS, and maybe it was because it emulated a previous processor architecture; but I don't really know since I've never installed it.

Anyway I don't really see the point in a real setup if a virtual one does the job. Right now I simply know of no DOS game that DOSBox 0.72 can't run perfectly--granted I don't have so many. But if you think, as apparently many other people, that a real setup will be 100 per cent compatible, or more compatible than DOSBox, just because it's "real", you may be in for surprises. It seems to me that DOSBox is *way* more compatible than a real DOS machine, at least if that's not a very standarized Compaq or HP or etc.