The BearWindows VESA driver (for 9x[1] and NT[2]) works well on QEMU. The last version of VBEMP that won’t nag you on each boot is G. Of course, that does nothing about the rather poor support for resolution independence on historical Windows, so 1280x1024 is about the largest practical resolution.

(Unfortunately, Sound Blaster 16 emulation is known to be broken in combination with the Gtk UI[3], so no / choppy sound for you, but things should work over SPICE. I’ve yet to find a SPICE client that will maintain a fixed 2:1 display scale with no interpolation.

A helpful HN user described[4] how to enable SMB1 on recent versions of Samba and so share files over something other than floppy images, TFTP, or active FTP. I haven’t found a better way to do this with QEMU’s native Samba integration than launching it, then finding the generated smb.conf somewhere in /tmp and patching it.)

[1] https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm

[2] https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbemp.htm

[3] https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/469

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29260861

I've been real spoiled with the auto-resolution switching support with the QEMU guest agent and libvirt drivers and that becomes painfully obvious when I resize a Win2k/Win98 VM and scroll bars appear...

I haven't had much trouble with the virt-manager GUI in terms of sound. For Win2K I could install the server edition and remote into it over RDP if it ever becomes an issue.

You might consider 86Box. It's emulation rather than virtualization, but it supports a range of graphics cards. This makes it easier to use the default drivers and/or find other drivers online.

Another emulation option is Bochs. I haven't played with it in years though.

Fun side note: Bochs has a working port on the PlayStation Portable (PSP). Booting up Windows 95 on my PSP in high school was my geeky party trick.

I think I've tried messing with that before but I couldn't get it to work right. It's an extremely accurate emulation of the hardware but that comes at the cost of performance and the stuff I wanted to mess with for nostalgic reasons didn't really need emulation that accurate.

Still solid options for anyone else looking into more accurate emulation of old machines, though, these two pieces of software can get keep that thirty year old piece of legacy software running for at least another decade or so!

PCem is probably the more suitable emulator if accuracy is not as important.

Has development of PCem restarted?

Yes. New maintainers.