DOSBox is made for emulating a PC running some form of DOS to play games. It does emulate enough of PC hardware to do that and because of booter games (ie. game

DOSBox is made for emulating a PC running some form of DOS to play games. It does emulate enough of PC hardware to do that and because of booter games (ie. games running directly from their own boot disks) it can also boot MS-DOS. However the development team doesn't care for non-game uses. There are some forks (e.g. DOSBox-X) that do (and also add more features) but in general it is more of a "compatibility" layer than a full emulator - think of it as Rosetta for DOS. 86box (a fork of PCem) is a full PC hardware emulator trying to emulate original real hardware as faithfully as possible, including their performance characteristics, limitations, etc. You can actually install Windows XP inside 86box on an emulated Pentium MMX 233MHz with an S3 Virge and a Voodoo 2 (though for better performance -and compatibility- Windows 95 is better).