no and it is not intended that it should.

What is the reason?

this reason is so sweet and awesome that if you knew your head would explode!
Qbix saved your life just now, be thankfull

dosbox is an emulator. not your real pc.

DosBox is like a separate computer within your computer. If you use it to run a BIOS ROM-reading tool, it'll only show what's in DosBox's BIOS, NOT what's in your computer's BIOS.

keropi wrote:

this reason is so sweet and awesome that if you knew your head would explode!
Qbix saved your life just now, be thankfull

Haha, just like the Monty Python skit about the funniest joke in the world 😉

Back on topic, there really isn't any reason for having any virtual machine be able to read the real/physical CMOS/BIOS rom on the motherboard.

I don't see any practical or useful reason why you would want to do that anyways.

Security. In most cases, a virtual machine has to be an isolated environment, without no access to real hardware.

What would happen if you VM throw an illegal call to the video subsystem or accesses some ports wildly? In an isolated VM, the virtual hardware would fail and the VM could hang or worse; but the host would survive. If the VM is not isolated, it could hang the entire REAL machine. In an environment running several VMs in a server that would be surely a problem; at home it would trash your data.

In "real" VMs (Virtualbox, VMWare), most hardware is virtualized as well as network connections (although a VM surely will have access to the network) and disk (or disks are independent from host disks). Note that DOSBox is more like an emulator: although it virtualizes network, graphics and sound; it "shares" disks with the host. A virus could escape the "virtual sandbox" through disk, but it won't get very far (a DOS virus running in Windows 7?).