pcem VS qemu-3dfx

For emulation, you can look into PCem/86Box

Absolutely check out PCem for a closer to hardware emulation than dosbox, https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

One option is to try PCEm https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ which is a emulator for old computers that runs on Windows and Linux, I actually learned about it via this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9HP9W88Wew of a guy playing Sim Golf on his Windows PC using PCEm, this should be similar on Linux but I'm not sure if the SteamDeck will have enough power but maybe worth a try

For hardcore mode, compile PCEm - I think brew has most of the dependencies available ... https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/ - have fun!

You use 86box or PCem which are not virtualizers but hardware emulators so you will need a really fast CPU (especially in single thread). The advantage is that Windows 98 will be running on period appropriate hardware, since all of it is being emulated real-time.

QEMU [0] emulates many systems, including the 32-bit Intel architecture. For retro gaming specifically I can recommend PCem [1], which also emulates a wide range of sound and graphics cards, from IBM MDA to 3dfx Voodoo 2.

[0] https://www.qemu.org/

[1] https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

You could try it with PCem

There is also https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx pass-through 3D acceleration for qemu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e34mSBxDm7s

I've been porting this to Nixos all week. Handles glide emulation pretty well

https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

As for 3D acceleration, I've seen this repository (no idea if it works) https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx, and I've also seen that QEMU added the "ati-vga" device, which supports the Rage 128 Pro and Radeon RV100, but those seem to be a bit WIP.

And, here we also have the 3rd option which is less well-known than CrossOver and Parallel Desktop while targeting older Windows games with compatibility issues on modern Windows, QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

You can check out qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon macOS. https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx/wiki/Apple-Silicon-macOS-Prerequisites

If you are a true gamer from the late 90' s though, you can and probably will run into an old game that doesn't work on modern windows. PCem is really the only good option IMO, but performance is very limited. Especially with glide and 3d acceleration, even the fastest CPUs aren't able to emulate much faster than a pentium II 200mhz at voodoo 2 at full speed (if you are emulating MMX on top of that forget it). Virtualization is possible but not likely to help as win95 virtualization is very basic and doesn't do much gaming things very well. With that said, there are some pretty crazy virtualization projects out there; here is one that requires you to compile everything from source yourself for basically no reason https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx (have fun).