Hi!
Actually, many reasonably new computers supported the following:
- boot from USB storage devices (flash sticks, SD cards in card
readers, USB zip, USB floppy, USB CD/DVD, harddisks, SSD etc.)
- use USB keyboards as if they were PS/2
- use USB mice as if they were PS/2
You may have to first configure the BIOS setup to tell it that you want
to boot in legacy (BIOS, not UEFI) mode and that you want USB legacy
support.
One limitation is that PS/2 mice lack many extra features USB mice may
have, so you will usually not get support for much more than 3 buttons,
one of which can be a wheel.
When doing some reaction time experiments, I also noticed that actual
PS/2 keyboards had a more predictable delay between pressing the button
and DOS noticing it. USB legacy support had more jitter and it was
noticeable that USB processing sometimes delayed other activities of my
app. So I preferred PS/2 keyboards in my experiment.
I do not know whether USB serial or USB printer port devices are covered
by BIOS based USB legacy support, but it would be interesting to know!
Note that most BIOSes do not support plugging or changing legacy USB
storage after boot. So you can only access USB storage that you booted
from, or which at least was present at boot, that way. On the other
hand, those will be presented to DOS as if they were their classic
BIOS-supported non-USB counterparts, making it much easier for DOS to
use them without having to load DOS USB drivers :-)
Regards, Eric
PS: Note that DOS wants MBR partitioned drives, not GPT partitioned ones.
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