If you're into 1990s-era games, which would generally be the ones that require Win98, take a look at PCem. It meticulously emulates PC hardware, to the point where it's running the original PC BIOS and video BIOS code against it (which means you have to find and download the corresponding images - but they're easily found online). Needless to say, when it comes to software compatibility, it's superb - you can run the original Win98 just fine under it. Or the original MS-DOS, if you want to dial even further back.

Because of that low-level emulation approach, it's not exactly fast. But modern high-end PCs can just about handle something on the order of Pentium 300 + 3dfx Voodoo, which is adequate for pretty much any game from the 90s.

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

> Those problems are easily worked around, of course

Ehm... I think you learned to work around these issues so gradually that you don't realize how complicated the mess that you've solved is

It's not particularly complicated, just extremely fragile.

Only the Legacy VirtualBox paravirtualisation interface provides all of the BIOS interrupts and glue code that the Windows 98 installer requires. The Sound Blaster 16 audio card will work out of the box in Windows 98, but VirtualBox itself has trouble copying the virtual audio out onto the host, playing only 3 seconds of the audio at a time and skipping a little; eventually it crashes. So, use the ICH AC97 audio card instead, but then you need to find drivers for it.

As for the VGA adapter, that used to work out of the box (once you installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions), but the additions' support for Windows 98 was dropped a long time ago, so that's no longer an option either.

Put simply, you need the Legacy interface to run the installer, SciTech Display Doctor for the VGA card (which is now free), and Realtek AC97 Win9x audio drivers (which you can find very easily).

Then it all just works... for now.

>>I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...

Tbf, also about $30 ebay purchase away from buying an early 2000 era laptop that will just run win98 and the game natively - so not all hope is lost :-)

I built a Pentium 3-based PC with Windows 98 just for games of that era. (It's complete with a CRT and ball mouse.)

I wonder how well dosbox would fare. It might not do well at all, given the specifics that seem to be required, but it often ends up being an optimal solution for items old enough (which is generally a few years older than this).

Have you investigated what was missing to get the game running in Wine? In the case of one of my favorite games (Worms Armageddon), I was able to fix the remaining issues in Wine with a few simple patches (though, to be fair, I was fortunate to have access to the game's source code...)

I don't have access to the source, I have no idea why it doesn't work on (EDIT: Modern) Windows, and I don't remember what happened when I last tried it on Wine; when that didn't work, I settled for the VM approach I described, which does.

Wine and ReactOS are probably our best bet for archiving programs and making them usable in the indefinite future. With Wine, you have the advantage of having access to the source code, both to peruse and modify. Being able to edit Wine's source code and use its debugging facilities does help a lot in figuring out compatibility issues.