I spent this afternoon testing VPC 2007 versus DOSBOX 0.70. Admittedly, I was not using a sub sim. I used a classic business stock trading game, 1830.
It took me a while to get it set up, but here are my findings:
(1) DOSBOX is much more straight forward to use for anyone who already has Windows up and running. VPC/DOS is a good exercise to remember why playing games with DOS was such a pain in the ass to get them configured to run.
(2) Video updates in DOSBOX were much smoother than VPC despite a top of the line system (QX6700 @ 3.2GHz with 8800GTX). Although turning off hardware virtualization did help updates a bit. The game was somewhat clunky, but playable. However, this is not a game with a lot of motion (turn oriented stock trading). I dedicate an entire processor to just running VPC.
(3) The place where VPC shined was in terms of compute performance. 1830 is somewhat chess like and the computation of game moves/turns can be fairly intensive as the game explores possibilities. Despite having set DOSBOX CPU cycles to MAX, VPC clearly consumed more CPU cycles (a steady 100% of the allocated processor). However, turn computation was a little less than twice as fast a DOSBOX.
Bottom line: DOSBOX has a convenient set up and much smoother graphics. VPC better allocation of RAW CPU to the hosted game. Game receives almost twice as many CPU cycles.
