Weird that your decade old computer wouldn't boot DOS, I've booted MS-DOS on my previous i7 4770K computer from an external floppy disk drive. I tried some CGA

Weird that your decade old computer wouldn't boot DOS, I've booted MS-DOS on my previous i7 4770K computer from an external floppy disk drive. I tried some CGA games i wrote and they kinda worked with the exception of BIOS not supporting text in CGA mode. But to answer the question, FreeDOS like MS-DOS and DR-DOS has drivers in the form of TSRs and DEVICE=blah.sys files. The only drivers it needs itself is for disk and basic video output, which are provided by the BIOS.