Since I did not expect any help or get any about freedos and #qemu I was able to figure it out for myself that I could use fat🇷🇼path to generate a fat instance of a directory tree and make that a drive, though it spits out a warning. Freedos 12 behaved poorly in qemu curses, but the newest 13 does so correctly. Sadly, in terms of my goals, most of the #freedos devel tooling require running 32 bit protected mode extenders like go32v2 rather than offer and do true real mode dos builds, though.