I miss being able to make small programs in debug on a Dos prompt and just dumping the machine code to a com file. It was a great way to test out and learn assembly language, and you didn't need a compiler or any other programs to make something that executed other than what was built in and a nice printed list of interrupts.

Some simple things I remember playing with in middle school, might work in a dosbox emulator window?:

pc speaker:

  out 61,1

change video mode:

  mov ax,0x13
  int 0x10

Then there were cool msdos debug scripts, where you had text listings of assembly with debug commands that when piped into debug it wrote out a com file:

https://www.google.com/search?q=dos+debug+script&ie=utf-8&oe...

Some could low level format hard drives, and there were lots of other fun utilities and amusements, much more so than batch files. I'd say the modern analogue is python scripts.