Recently I've heard that pcem emulator (which is created to emulate old PC) is quite usable, contrary to the past.

I've tried to emulate my old Pentium 200 and Windows98. 3dfx games were not there yet, but for all the rest of the games I was pleasantly surprised. All obscure titles I could not play in Wine (nor works in modern windows, as I heard) are playable. For example Battle Isle 3.

It's far better than VirtualBox emulating the W98, which I tried and experienced many problems (mainly with graphics).

I've installed also 486 DX2 DOS machine today. We'll see how the DOS game are emulated. Heard that it might be better than dosbox. So far, I've remembered the old days of memory problems (640kB would be enough for anyone, right?)

What do you think about pcem? Have you tried it yet? Planning to?

I haven't used it at least not in a while, because it turns out Wine is years ahead on most fronts.

Yep, PCem is one of those emulation projects I'm planning to try asap. Compared to DOSBox, PCem is more like a complete virtual machine than an "x86 emulator with DOS".

I've already got a retro-game that I haven't been able to play on my Windows 10 system to try in PCem...

Never heard of it, but it sounds great. Of the games from my childhood, I think only Hexplore remains, at least I can't remember of any other, off the top of my head. It'll be interesting to try and get it running.

I haven't tried it myself but it seems to be very popular with the Vogons crowd for running old Win9x stuff that was intended for first generation pentiums.

These days I prefer to run that stuff on classic or modern'ish hardware but I've been keeping an eye on it in case the supply of such systems drys up. I find troubleshooting a sophisticated emulator is more difficult than troubleshooting real hardware.

I still have that old Pentium 200 at my parents house, maybe it's even functional today (was when I've run it last time). It is very tempting, but CRT monitor and another pc takes a lot of space and I have a small flat. And I don't even know how would I install software there. Old floppy disks are probably all dead by now, CD rot is a thing too, it had no usb drive.

Wonder if I could run STARS! on that.

Wonder if it would finally let me play Epic Megagame's Fire Fight.

People are always dropping by Vogons asking if they should use pcem or dosbox. Use both and don't just use those. We have PCs not consoles, we can use more than one thing. Pcem development focus has been on 9x so DOS support is still buggy but it can only improve. Most of the time when people compare emulators they only run a handful of their favorite games and declare an emulator the best thing ever, I've seen people do this for years for some reason. If you have issues post in their respective forums so the software can improve, don't just complain that something doesn't work on some random forum.

Space is the primary down side for classic hardware. :)

This has totally gone under my radar. I don't necessarily care for its MS-DOS emulation (because DOSBox works so great for me and is easy to use), but if it has the ability to run Win9x era, early DirectX games, then hell yeah!

Yes, dosbox is enough probably for everything, at least the r4000 branch (the stable version give me some problems in some games). However, for the extra nostalgic feeling of managing the 640kb conventional memory the pcem wins in this case.

I should add, that I forgot to mention that you need a fast processor to be able to play some of the 3dfx games. However I think the next version of pcem should improve the performance a bit.

I've just tried 2 games I own that don't work under Windows 10 or on modern hardware. One doesnt run at all, and the other runs but is very laggy. So i'm personally not a fan of it. You will also need a pretty decent PC otherwise Windows (even 95) will lag.

What games exactly?

You can also try to emulate Pentium with lesser frequency and see if the lag stops.

The two I tried where Mortyr (which failed to even run) and Die Hard Trilogy which ran but was way to laggy to play.

I went to the requirements of Die Hard and it still lagged. (I didnt try going lower than the original game's minium requirements.)