GiGaBiTe
Veteran Member
I already have VMWare Workstation Player installed on my computer if I want to use a more traditional emulator.
VMWare is not an emulator, it is a hypervisor that virtualizes x86 hardware. In a very limited sense it can be called an emulator because it emulates a common hardware platform that is known to be supported by as many different operating systems as possible to be as flexible as possible.
DosBox on the other hand is an x86 emulator for both the CPU and classic PC peripherals like video and sound cards. You can cycle emulate a slower CPU with DosBox, like a 8088 or 386 for DOS applications that are timing sensitive. You can also emulate things like a Sound Blaster, GUS or Adlib. You won't find those features in VMWare, ever.
MS-DOS Player takes code directly from DosBox and some from QEMU, according to the author.
DOSBox is 3.6MB. MS-DOS Player is 440KB.
And .NET framework is several thousand megabytes. Doesn't stop lazy programmers from using one or two functions from .NET in a 250kb application requiring 900MB+ of dependencies. DosBox is benign in comparison.
The advantages have already been explained. MS-DOS Player runs DOS text-mode applications and utilities natively in the Windows console with direct mouse cursor and clipboard integration. It can create self-contained EXEs that run seamlessly as console programs. It's not for playing games.
While DosBox doesn't natively run in Windows CLI, it's not hard to make a shortcut and a script to make containerized executables in DosBox. DosBox-X has more features to support easier clipboard sharing and mouse capture.
MS-DOS player is far more limited in comparison. It doesn't even look like it supports protected mode, which limits it to extremely simple applications that can be done by other more modern programs.