In the early 2000s I worked for a company selling a DOS-based 4GL product, which was part of an "embedded" system running Novell DOS. This became hard to continue with due to lack of support for e.g. SATA, USB, new networking hardware. So I moved the product onto Linux+DOSEMU with Samba and CUPS replacing the DOS network drives and printing facilities. It took some time to configure DOSEMU correctly such that raw access to the video hardware, serial ports, parallel ports etc. worked as needed. But once done, it worked perfectly, and last I heard it was still in use, so it kept a company with a niche product in business for an additional decade at least. For all I know, it's still in use today, nearly two decades later.
I have also run games with it, but only older stuff like Keen. As you say, for gaming purposes, DosBox is a better choice. But if you want a full emulation with real hardware access, then DOSEMU is (or was) better.
That said, I know nothing about what the aims of DOSEMU2 are, the documentation is rather sparse and it looks like it's had big regressions from DOSEMU (1) looking at the changes. Region locking is a big deal, I required this for running multiuser 4GL database applications. Looks like that was broken for a significant period of time. I'm also unsure what the purpose of "64-bit DOS" is, particularly within an emulator used to run legacy applications. Hard to know without knowing what the requirements are that drove this, but I do wonder if this isn't an itch being scratched rather than being useful for real-world end use.
In the early 2000s I worked for a company selling a DOS-based 4GL product, which was part of an "embedded" system running Novell DOS. This became hard to continue with due to lack of support for e.g. SATA, USB, new networking hardware. So I moved the product onto Linux+DOSEMU with Samba and CUPS replacing the DOS network drives and printing facilities. It took some time to configure DOSEMU correctly such that raw access to the video hardware, serial ports, parallel ports etc. worked as needed. But once done, it worked perfectly, and last I heard it was still in use, so it kept a company with a niche product in business for an additional decade at least. For all I know, it's still in use today, nearly two decades later.
I have also run games with it, but only older stuff like Keen. As you say, for gaming purposes, DosBox is a better choice. But if you want a full emulation with real hardware access, then DOSEMU is (or was) better.
That said, I know nothing about what the aims of DOSEMU2 are, the documentation is rather sparse and it looks like it's had big regressions from DOSEMU (1) looking at the changes. Region locking is a big deal, I required this for running multiuser 4GL database applications. Looks like that was broken for a significant period of time. I'm also unsure what the purpose of "64-bit DOS" is, particularly within an emulator used to run legacy applications. Hard to know without knowing what the requirements are that drove this, but I do wonder if this isn't an itch being scratched rather than being useful for real-world end use.