What would be really interesting: porting DOSEMU 1.4.0 to it. This would give us a maintained unix-like OS combined with a huge abandonware dos library turning those old machines into something fun and maybe useful.
You can just run MS-DOS or FreeDOS directly on those machines, that's what the machines were made for.
A good thing about DOSEMU against DOSBOX is that the first could run high end DOS game at amazing speeds as the environment was more like Wine than emulating the whole machine, so you could run Tomb Raider, Need For Speed, Duke Nukem 3D... on a Pentium II while 'simulating' a Pentium MMX or a Pentium 90-like speeds, if not more, being far closer to the performance you got under W95/W98.
And, as you said, booting SvarDOS either from a floppy or from an IDE->CF card it's straightforward.