I don’t think I understand your point. I thought that DOS mostly relies on the BIOS to initialize and access hardware (keyboard, video, disks), no drivers neede

I don’t think I understand your point. I thought that DOS mostly relies on the BIOS to initialize and access hardware (keyboard, video, disks), no drivers needed there. Games access the hardware directly, but they mostly only use VGA registers that any graphic card handles (plus audio, but that’s similar given the SB emulation). On the other hand, Linux needs more hardware and relies much less on the BIOS. The kernel won’t be able to access e.g. the hard drive if it can’t speak to/initialize the IDE controller directly, something neither DOS nor any game needs to do. Or did I misunderstand something?