So I was bored today.....

As of today this is the oldest version of Windows to run DOSBox. Windows NT 3.51 was released May 30, 1995.

DOSBox 0.74 on Windows NT 3.51

The following has been performed on the official DosBox 0.74 win32 install:

1. Extraction of files in the DOSBox installer.

2. Hexedit of dosbox.exe:
Replacement of shgetspecialfolderpatha with SHGetPathFromIDList
This was added by IE4 Desktop Update and is not needed.

Replacement of ws2_32.dll to wsock32.dll
NT 3.51 does not support Winsock 2 so hopefully this makes DOSBox use Winsock v1.1

3. Included dosbox.conf since if dosbox.conf was missing the screen would flash briefly and then exit.

4. Inclusion of MSVCRT.DLL

5. Inclusion of Mesa3D v6.32 OPENGL32.dll otherwise DOSBox will attempt to use the old OPENGL32.dll in SYSTEM32 and error out due to a missing function. You can replace this opengl32.dll with a newer one but DOSBox still would not start, I'm thinking likely because I'm running in a VM and don't have a OpenGL ICD installed.

6. Renamed the original dosbox.exe to dosbox.org

7. Inclusion of this readnow.txt

Links:
https://sourceforge.net/p/vice-emu/mailman/message/34180058/
https://sourceforge.net/p/dosbox/code-0/HEAD/ … /misc/cross.cpp

To be clear DOSBox isn't actually using dsound.dll and opengl32.dll. These are dependencies so are required for launch. So DOSBox is most likely using GDI for video and waveout for audio.