Sound like more of a VMware problem than DOSBox.

collector wrote:

Sound like more of a VMware problem than DOSBox.

It runs dozens of other games and tools just fine. It starts up Dosbox just fine, the only problem is closing it, the dosbox application does not stop the process correctly. It does not ever give an error message so there is no good way I can tell why it is hanging like that. As soon as you click the x or type exit it just freezes until I hard shut down the image.

An OS or VM crash is always the fault of the OS or the VM. By definition.

realnc wrote:

An OS or VM crash is always the fault of the OS or the VM. By definition.

Except the OS isn't crashing, the VM continues to run the application hangs and won't terminate. I can run other applications even afterwards.

I can get Dosbox to load, mount drives correctly, play warcraft 2 for a half hour, and the only issue here is when I type exit it hangs. There is no way that is the fault of the OS or Vmware.

Except it only happens with the vm and not with the native OS...
Anyway, because of reported issues of mouse stuff it is not adisable to run in a VM. Dosbox runs natively in all major OS, so...

It works just fine, including the mouse.

The problem is when I type exit, whatever method it is doing to kill the program is failing hard.

I am building the VM to archive all my old stuff into one easy repository, and these games work fine as well until the point I'm ready to kill dosbox and it freezes only at that point. It would seem that terminating the program should be easy enough and Vmware is not treating this program any differently than the half a million that work just fine on it.

Yes, again, except it only happens with this combination. It doesn't happen on a real Windows XP machine, it doesn't happen on my VMWare Fusion with Windows XP. It only happens with your Image.
And again, it's not advisable to run the emulation inside of an emulation/virtualization. And as you can see the support for doing this is not happening as no one cares about this and frankly it's not really debugable.

The only thing that comes to mind, what version of Dosbox are you using? 0.74 is the only supported version...

Try DOSBox in Windows safe mode and\or remove Vmware additions.

You can also try the unofficial SDL2 DOSBox build on these forums and see if there's any difference.

An adaptation to SDL 2.0 (Alpha-level Android build attached)

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this - are you saying that DOSBox won't run under Windows 10? If so, then I hope it gets fixed before circumstances (i.e. new hardware) force me to 'upgrade' to Windows 10.

Kerr, please don't go off topic and reread the OP's post.
His problem is that there is something wrong when running (or rather exiting) Dosbox in VM of Windows XP. Dosbox runs fine in Windows 95 and newer 😉

DosFreak wrote:

Try DOSBox in Windows safe mode and\or remove Vmware additions.

You can also try the unofficial SDL2 DOSBox build on these forums and see if there's any difference.

An adaptation to SDL 2.0 (Alpha-level Android build attached)

Thanks, that does work! It will still freeze on exit but if I close the status window it closes everything which didn't happen on the official 0.74.

This is obviously not a problem with VMware and the advantages to having my 20 dos games combined with 20 or so of my old ass XP games should be obvious.

If it only happens in this VM and not in any other XP installation it must be something that you did...

To me I use what works best, dos games via Dosbox on all systems, XP games in a VM...