I finally got my XI8088 pc build booting dos! It's a isa board kit PC <http://www.malinov.com/Home/sergeys-projects/xi-8088>
The PC has actually been functioning for about 3 weeks now, the last piece was a compact flash card and IDE adapter. Turns out the BIOS for this board doesn't actually like real hard drives (or at least not my 160GB ide drive)
I tried freeDOS but kept getting 386 only errors after installing it in a VM (since I don't have a floppy drive on my modern PC to make install discs from)
I may attempt to do an HD install of legacy freeDOS in the future