If you are just running dosbox on a commodity pc, why not just run the programs under dos, lol.
There are a number of reasons why installing real DOS on any reasonably modern PC isn't really a good solution for playing games.
Many games have speed problems on faster processors; not only running too fast but certain games are known to crash on launch when you try to run them on anything around 200MHz or faster due to a timing bug. Games that use prefetch-queue tricks won't work on Pentiums or newer.
Some games don't like more than 16MB of memory to be installed in your system.
Many games require you to fiddle with your memory manager to get varying amounts of EMS and XMS memory. Certain games are very fiddly to get working and require a configuration that pretty much won't work with anything else (Ultima 7 comes to mind....)
You'll possibly need to setup a seperate FAT16 or FAT32 partition on your hard drive for DOS (depending on what version of DOS you are running).
You have to set up CDROM and sound card drivers under DOS. CD drives can usually be done with the oakcdrom.sys on the win98 boot disk but good luck getting sound card drivers for anything remotely modern. Even then, many PCI sound cards and newer don't perform FM synthesis properly (like on the Adlib or Sound Blaster), often your music will sound terrible if it works at all. DOSBOX also allows you to use soundfonts for high quality general MIDI music, which under DOS would require an expensive wavetable soundcard or MIDI synth.
There are workarounds to many of these problems but DOSBOX gets around all of them, and you don't even have to reboot out of your main OS to use it
And if you use a frontend like DFend Reloaded its even easier - just drag and drop
Unfortunately that's windows only, not sure of any equivalents for AROS.
