I am running Windows Me 4.90.30000
1.15 GHz AMD Athlon XP processor
ECS K7S5A main board
160 meg of memory (the slower memory of the two kinds acceptable
to this board - been awhile since I last dealt with it)
Running an 80 Gig HDD with mostly free space, one partition for
drive C:. Also a CD-RW drive on drive E:.

Installed DOSBox-0.63 in the C:\Program Files\dosbox-0.63 folder.

I cannot make DOSBox accept command line input from Windows.
I have a desire to run dosbox -conf scorch.conf so that the
program will run a 1995 DOS game called Scorched Earth, which I
have located on the C:\scorch directory.

I had some limited success with command line input, where I can
get it to report the drives it has mounted, which on startup is
drive Z. My Windows desktop shortcut command line was set to
read "C:\(etc)dosbox.exe" "-c mount c c:\scorch\scorch.exe", also
tried "-c mount c c:\", and without quotes, -c mount c:\.

Naturally the without-quotes example failed because Windows
discards evertyhing after the space. Also tried to include the
path and program and its commandline input within one quote
string, but that was wrong Windows syntax.

Meanwhile, I created a version of dosbox.conf that will run my
game from a desktop shortcut, and close DOSBox at game exit. I
did this by adding autoexec commands to:

mount c c:\scorch
C:
call scorch.exe
exit

I also modified the configfile to increase the number of frames
skipped from 0 to 3 to eliminate broken sound output from the
game.

Until I can get command line input done right, my work-around is
to have several configfiles: orig.conf is the original
dosbox.conf, I have dosboxSCORCH.conf, and I just grab one of
these and save-as dosbox.conf and overwrite the existing file.
Then run DOSBox.

I can be playing music in Winamp while I play my DOS game with
all of its nukes and leapfrog bombs blasting the sound system. I
have my firewall and my anti-virus programs running on the system
tray. Everything co-exists beautifully.

Sometimes the DOS game locks up after some time has passed (hour
or more) and does not respond to the mouse for several clicks,
but then resumes working. Sometimes the game doesn't respond to
the keyboard, but in either case I can always bring up the game's
main menu with F1 and I can always alt-tab out of it back to
Windows.

There may be some config.sys settings in the dosbox configfile
that may address some of these issues? The game's behavior is
never fatal to DOSBox or Windows.