Uhm, have you considered buying a separate hard drive to keep dosbox and your games on?

Still no reason to do it this way unless you want to live with the quirks...
You can make yourself a hard disk image, put your dosgames on that and just run the latest dosbox on your real machine. Mount the image and play...

As I said, I'd like to have my DOSBox games on the same Virtual machine as other older games (that might update the registry etc.). A seperate hard drive wouldnt be portable across OS and hardware like a virtual machine is - I can take this Virtual machine file and run it on a Mac, Linux box, or (as at present) on a 4.7GHz Win7 64-bit host.

Hard drive IMAGE. You can take that with you on whatever OS you like, just like a virtualbox. Or just put them in one folder/usb stick, since you already must somehow move your virtualbox you can simply move that folder as well. (edit, I see you probably replied to the post about the hard drive and not mine).
But you don't need to if you rather live with the problems that come with running an emulator inside a virtualizer... (some of which you already experienced).
But some things just don't work out as you wish and you might have to rethink your ways.

Yes thanks Dominus, I'm aware that you could use a USB stick etc., but that doesnt let you run under XP on a Win7 platform nor inherit any registry settings etc..
As I have mentioned, it would be nice to have a single "Legacy PC" build from which I can run my old games, and having DOSBox on there would help with that - its possible that someone else might have had a similar idea and might actually have some solutions.

Then ask the virtualbox guys to fix the bugs.

Hmm, I only asked if if anyone had any useful hints or tips on using DOSBox within VirtualBox - I didnt mean to start a flame war.

Useful tip: Don't run emulators within emulators.

You WILL always run into problems when you try to run dosbo this way.
If you put the virtual box and all your dos games one an usb stick you ARE set. Your windows games will run in the virtualbox and once you mount the stick with dosbox on ANY OS you are set too. Dosbox doesn't need any registry settings only one mounting to be the same.

Fact is the way you want to do this will not work fine (not to mention that some dosgames need a very powerfull machine running dosbox, a virtualizer running windows running dosbox does NOT cut it) so you need to adapt. If you can't adapt no problem, it's your grief.

Shame to see such hostility to VirtualBox here - I've been very impressed with its performance, stability and compatibility. Its fast and getting faster. Running an emulator on a virtual machine shouldnt theoretically be an issue, but of course theres a huge distance between theory and practice, especially when it comes to coding.
As I said earlier, its very close to being fit for purpose for me - if it wasnt for a little mouse lag I would be happy to go with the setup I already have.
If there's no solution for that then I'll continue merrily with my 2 separate environments - pity tho, as a single environment is a more elegant solution.

Hmm, not sure this counts as hostility towards any particular VM it's just a fact that you can have all kinds of problems running a VM within another VM is all.

I think folks have been trying to say that it makes no sense to run Dosbox under a VM as it runs just fine under your native OS, including x64-bit flavors.

Also note that any games installed under Dosbox are not going to mess about with the registry as these are DOS games and no nothing about Windows Registry entries.

Shame to see such hostility to VirtualBox here

There is no hostility. Besides that VirtualBox is cool for what it does.

Yep, definitely no hostility towards VirtualBox. A shame that you think there is any because you might think our advice was because of that imagined hostility. Don't think that, take our advice seriously.
You can of course try your luck on any VirtualBox forum...

The amount of space a DOS game uses is negligible (for the storage sizes today), so a lot of your collection would fit in a USB stick for easy transport over to your new PC. That could be done over a network too (and rather quickly also), even old PC to new PC with a twisted pair cable.
Back in those days I used to slim Windows 3.1 to the bare essentials I used, it ended up taking up around 4 or 5 megs...nowadays only the Windows help takes up 24 megs...as much as (more or less) an entire Windows for Workgroups install would take. No one makes much fuss about it because space is quite, quite bigger and rather inexpensive.
If you have enough money to change your PC once a year, maybe investing in an extra hard drive (cheap and big these days) is also worth your while.
Virtualbox is great, I use it myself for a number of things...but running DosBox one of them is not...it's generally a bad idea and, definitely, IMO not worth the problems you're having because you are designing a poor solution.

Hi BigBodZod, Bloodbat,
Thanks for your responses - its clear that everyone so far has issues with the idea of DOSBox within a VM, but that's just getting off-topic really.
I havn't suggested everyone go out and start using VMs.
As I've pointed out, I happen to have DOSBox installed on a VM, its working great for my purposes apart from a single issue, and I was curious if any of my fellow DOSBox users may have had suggestions that might help with that - it could be something really simple, and it would have been crazy not to ask.
It would be cool to actually get all my old games on the same host, but if we're not quite there yet then so be it, I'll carry on as I am with a seperate local folder.
On the other hand, if someone actually has some experience with DOSBox within VirtualBox and has some helpful hints that would be great.

*sigh*
We don't have problems with the idea, we KNOW that running dosbox in any VM will have issues that won't go away by tweaking some ini or whatever. Huge difference you don't seem to get.

I understand your point of view Dominus, you dont need to keep being unpleasant about it. Its possible that others have a different experience.

You'll get no help here running DOSBox in a emulator.

Thread closed.