Most people use Windows or Linux to do all their work,
including development work.

But there is another environment suitable for development
of console mode Windows executables, and that is Freedos
with some additions.

Freedos is a much simpler environment, and free. You can
burn a hard drive image to USB stick and boot it on a
computer that doesn't even have a hard disk. You don't need
Windows or Linux.

Unfortunately Freedos is not distributed in a form that is
suitable for my use above, so I have produced my own
self-contained distribution, and I have used it successfully
to develop my own project, PDOS/386.

Here is what I did.

Create an empty hard disk image (MBR, FAT32) using
Windows Disk Management so that it is .vhd and can be mounted
under Windows. Mark the partition active, probably by using
"diskpart" from an administrator prompt. Go to the drive and do:
dir /ah
rd /s /q "System Volume Information"
unmount disk

Download the "Live CD" version of Freedos 1.3 from
http://freedos.org

Using an emulator, e.g. qemu with:
qemu-system-i386 -boot order=a -fda FD13BOOT.img -drive file=freedos.vhd,index=0,media=disk,format=raw
choose english, then choose "no"

Run "sys c:" to install Freedos onto the hard disk.

Run "fdisk /mbr 1" to install the MBR.

Then:

c:
md freedos
cd freedos
md bin
cd bin
copy a:\freedos\bin

Exit the emulator now, as the rest can be done from Windows.

Mount the hard disk image under Windows.

There are some important things missing on that first floppy
disk, so you need to extract the ISO using 7z or whatever
and copy them from freedos\bin to \freedos\bin:
nansi.sys
move.exe
cwsdpmi.exe
raread.com
rawrite3.com (renamed to rawrite.com)
chkdsk.exe
more.com
debug.com

I created a \dospath with fninit.exe which is part of
PDOS/86 to initialize floating point for environments
like Bochs that don't initialize it. Also included is
reboot.com which was built by running comprb.bat in the
PDOS source tree.

I created a \winpath with unzip.exe and zip.exe downloaded
from the internet, so that I can have Windows versions of
these executables instead of the presumed DOS versions
available on the live CD. Also included is e.exe and emacs.rc
which is the microemacs editor suitable for all versions
of Windows. That was built from the source found in
custom.zip of the PDOS distribution.

I created \HX with the HX DOS extender (HXRT218.zip)
from the internet.

I copied Open Watcom 1.6 into \WATCOM

I manually created an autoexec.bat that includes PATH
references to d:\ which is meant to be a PDOS/386 disk.
I also added a readme.txt. I also added a config.sys to
increase the environment space to 4096 so that long
command lines would work, especially when trying to build
makefile.msv (which you should note needs to be built by
using pdmake -n and redirecting the output because of a
presumed HX bug when one 32-bit program executes another
via the 16-bit command.com - and even after that, the
dlltwin step needs to be run on PDOS/386 because it
calls system() too).

You can now unmount the hard disk and run Freedos like this:
qemu-system-i386 -drive file=freedos.vhd,index=0,media=disk,format=raw -drive file=pdos.vhd,index=1,media=disk,format=raw

Or you can burn the VHD to USB stick using Win32 disk imager
or whatever and boot that - Windows is no longer required.