Oh this brings some memories. I was one of the people who still ran DOS when this wasn't really very common any more, and was constantly looking for things like drivers that would bring proper vesa or sound support to newer hardware on DOS. I ended up starting a webpage dedicated to collecting those drivers for DOS, which by now must've been decades ago. It never grew very big, but I also never took it down. I wonder…
How late in the game were you running DOS?
I think the later Running-on-top-of-DOS-Windows-versions - the last one was Windows ME I believe - where trying to hide their DOS-based roots, and you had to use some hacks to actually boot into DOS. I can tell you that I used those hacks.
I never migrated to the "native" (non-DOS-based) Windows versions (I believe XP was the first consumer-not-dos-based version), but switched to Linux around that time.