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Sorry if this sound stupid, but can you run snow leopard using virtual box or any other system on a mac book pro running el capitan?
I upgraded and have some programs that will not work on the newer os version that I still want to use. Any other choices other than getting a old machine to run them?
thanks!

Theoretically you can. It depends on your actual hardware though. Newer Macs have a problem running older OSX versions as a guest.

I just got myself a new Mac and my old 10.6 VM will not start. I just got the Mac yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot it, but it's a top priority, so within the day I might have some more details. I'll keep you posted...

Yes, you can. I have 3 MacPro's (Late 2013) with El Capitan running Snow Leopard guests.

My recommendation: find VB version 5.0.34 r113845 specifically. Anything newer than that will get the double cursor issue.

Hope this helps!

OK, here are my findings. As I said until three days ago I had a 2011 MBP 17" with an Intel i7-2820QM @ 2.3 GHz. It was running fine all available OSX guests, from 10.5 to 10.13 (actually the last one has issues, but that's not for this discussion).

I now have a 2015 MBP 15" with an Intel i7-4870HQ @ 2.5GHz. All OSX guests that I've tried so far are running, except the 10.5 and the 10.6 ones. They kernel panicked at boot.

For the record, the old host OSX version was 10.9.5, but it could easily have been anything from 10.6.8 up to 10.13b. The host OSX version is not important, the processor is. Remember that the CPU is the only thing that does *not* get virtualized, and it passes as is, unfiltered to the guest. Some guests have issues with that.

There is a way to present a different CPU to the guest than the one that your host actually has. I changed mine and lo and behold, both the 10.5 and the 10.6 VMs are up and running! Success!!!

If you're having an issue like this, try to change to one of the following CPU profiles, by issuing the command (only *ONE* of them):

• 
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Xeon X5482 3.20GHz"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-2635QM"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-3960X"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i5-3570"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-5600U"
  VBoxManage modifyvm "<VM name>" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"
  

In my case everything everything i7* worked, the only two that didn't work are the "Xeon..." and the "i5..." ones. Your mileage may vary.