I've been struggling with this in my mind for quite some time now.
I've recently heard about FreeDOS and how great it appears to be. However, we must either make a partition for it on our harddrives, or boot from it with either USB or CD if we plan on using it portable.
DOSBox is easier, just install and run till you die.

But which software is the best when it comes to properly running MS-DOS on a modern PC?

I guess FreeDOS is more authentic in that you're actually running a genuine open-source derivative of MS-DOS, as a standalone OS, rather than virtually inside emulation.

But it really depends why you're asking?

DOSBox has come so far at this point and offers much that even the original DOS couldn't, not to mention the advantages of being able to run DOS games inside Windows.

Sounds like an answer good enough for me. Thanks!

DOSBox gets my vote. Open source, doesn't need any partition, easy to configure, lots of features out of the box and runs perfectly on pretty much any dual core system.

With the right setup you can even run Win 3.1 itself inside it.

You're way behind - Win 95 is possible, even on the Symbian port. Win 98 SE was doable but still a work in progress so needs tweaks.

I tried that with the DOSBox SVN Daum, I could never get 95 to run very well. But after a little driver hunting, 3.1 is pretty flawless.

I've never heard of FreeDOS, but I think I'll try it out. How is its driver support compared to DOSBox?

DOSBox is an emulator, so it will always be less performant than something running the software natively. Of course for games this old that's really not much of a concern, but I imagine for people with low-end computers trying to play high-end DOS games the difference might be noticeable.

FreeDOS is an actual operating system rather than a virtual machine. With DOSBox you don't need to worry about drivers as it's running on top of whatever system you're running day-to-day (whether that's Windows, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, or whatever else it's been ported to) and has drivers for its emulated hardware built-in, with FreeDOS you'd better hope that you can find DOS drivers for whatever hardware you run it on (or that it already includes what you need).

This is similar to comparing "Windows XP, or Wine?" (not quite, but close enough).

MS-DOS. No really, I install DOS 6.22 on every one of my computers since the 80286 days. Why? Because fuck yeah.

Yes!

It's getting harder and harder to find floppy drives and diskettes :P

Heh, getting a USB FDD and MS-DOS floppy image files is one of the easiest "retro" things to do on-line. And by the way, I still have my original floppies and OSes from the 286 day as well :-P

Isn't FreeDOS actual native DOS (like MS-DOS), while DOSBox is an emulator? So performance-wize, DOSBox is going to be significantly worse than FreeDOS (probably by a magnitude of 10x or more), yet much more convenient due to being able to run in a Windows or GNU/Linux environment.

There's also the issue of hardware compatibility... DOSBox can emulate something like an old Sound Blaster 16 sound card for example, but I assume FreeDOS can't do anything like that, so you'll need to find an old computer or compatible old hardware to play the old MS-DOS games with proper sound effects & music.

But if I had an old 386, 486, or Pentium 1 computer, I would definitely boot into DOS-mode to play the classic DOS games.