For DOS, DOSBox has special support for sound and video that you don't get in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), unless you have some sort of plugin of course to emulate a

For DOS, DOSBox has special support for sound and video that you don't get in a VM (e.g. VirtualBox), unless you have some sort of plugin of course to emulate a SoundBlaster, Gravis UltraSound or other peripheral (the world of DOS is mostly ISA). On the other hand, if you have e.g. Windows 98 running in a VirtualBox VM (which is actually surprisingly difficult), then you have a driver layer for VirtualBox's virtual hardware and Windows 98 would use it as it would use any other hardware (the early Windows world is mostly PCI).