I guess he has some usb cybersex device with software available only for win9x, that has timing problems in virtualbox, so that he finishes too fast 😉

Ah, well see that's a slightly different question. VirtualBox provides USB passthrough support, so that a device running in the virtual environment can talk directly to the USB device, bypassing the host OS. DOSBox does not support this, because DOS games pre-date USB and thus don't require it.

Other virtual machines abstract the services, for example many emulate a Sound Blaster 16, so that your virtual system can use an SB16 driver to play audio out of whatever hardware you have in your PC - be it USB audio or onboard PCI audio. This is not "USB support" because although you might have a USB sound card, the host OS takes care of it, presenting a "standard audio device" for any application to use.

This is how DOSBox works. It takes many of these "standard devices" that the OS has and presents them to a DOS application in a way it can use. This allows many types of devices to work (audio, serial/parallel port, network, etc.) but unlike VirtualBox and its USB passthrough support, if you don't have a driver for a device and for some strange reason you manage to find a DOS driver, you won't be able to use it with DOSBox.

That probably unanswers your question a bit, but might help someone trawling through the archives one day 😀 Of course unless you're writing your own drivers or working with obscure hardware, you probably don't need VirtualBox's USB passthrough support anyway...

To Malvineous: Thanks, again. By the way, in regards to DOS, I agree with you about Virtualbox USB support. In regards to Windows, Virtualbox USB support works perfectly for hardware incompatible with Vista.

To robertmo: Seriously, were you a friend or relative of Lawyerdude?