On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Marc Reinig wrote: (...)
What Windows OS can I use, or do I need to install DOS? (...) Windows has always been built on top of DOS, and few programmers would hav it any other way. If you right-click on the icon for your floppy, there'll options for formatting it as a DOS boot disk in most Windows versions.
Making a "Windows" partition that doesn't bring up the Graphic User Interface shouldn't be too many steps away if you like bootloaders in the style of GRUB, LILO, or partition magic and you know where the manual is. As far as compilers, I think Mister Osuch is using a DOS port of GCC (Gnu C Compiler, DJGPP), and this is a migration from MicroSoft's compiler, but Borland and Lattice should be doable, too. The hard part would be porting to a processor that isn't basically a clone of Intel, because I think I've read about some assembler macros in the code.