Note that this is not the MBR, but what is known as the "volume boot record" (VBR) which is located at the start of each partition. And to be honest, I don't think this code is significantly more readable than the Asm version... or maybe it's the lack of comments. It'd also be interesting to compare the compiled version's code with the handwritten Asm one.

Here is the annotated disassembly of the DOS 6.2 VBR: http://www.tburke.net/info/ntldr/bootsect.txt