While I appreciate those that do.. I simply can't imagine trying to keep some older hardware alive and running like this... I have reached for emulation time and again, and while there have been headaches and hiccups, it still seams easier than physical hardware to me.<p>In this case, I'd probably just try to do wired to a wireless ap/bridge. Especially since fast data isn't needed, a cheap $20 AP would probably do well enough (though wouldn't be integrated into the laptop itself.
Now that's a coincidence, just yesterday I was thinking if it would be possible to use WLAN in FreeDOS on my 1998 Toshiba Libretto xD I found one of the PCMCIA cards mentioned in the article for sell and immediately ordered it, can't wait to try it :-)
Meh, I would get a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, configure it as a wifi bridge, and connect the laptop to it via wired Ethernet. It means you can't carry the machine around while playing DOS games from the network, you'd have to keep it in a fixed location. But other than that it seems way less hacky.<p>I currently have my desktop PC (and a couple other machines) configured this way except using an Intel NUC as the bridge.
the first part is better: <a href="http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wireless-networking-in-dos/" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wireless-networking-in-dos/</a>