Correct. Read the forum. Yes. No.

You can boot a real copy of MS-DOS (and probably PC-DOS/DR-DOS/FreeDOS/OpenDOS/whatever) from a disk image.

You can also boot Windows 3.1 in the CVS versions.

Win95 cannot be booted, although people have certainly tried (and made some progress). DOSBox is missing a lot of things that Win95 needs but that games don't, so don't expect it to be supported any time soon.

I have a problem to boot with any floppy or iso image from freedos. The problem is that it starts until the first menu is displayed. With type in 1 for the item selction dosbox will crash with the message: "Exit to Error: Illegal option"

The command I use is "boot fdos1440.img -l a"

Whats wrong? 😢

despite hunterZ claims. I'm not sure that FreeDOS is supported (or has been tested at all)

I recall that
boot fdso1440.img should suffice. (no need to add -l a)

Thats the same problem. Is there any influence about the CPU or other devices? I use a AMD64 3200+ System.

I suggest you try the cvs of dosbox.
On the development forum are some details.
The boot code has been improved a lot.
Altthough I'm still not certain that freedos has been tested.

And do NOT use the dynamic core when testing OSs.

I have found the problem! It was the keyb.com device driver.

But now another question. Is it also possible to boot from an CD ISO image?

Thanks for your answers.

Use Qemu.