I tried DosBox, too slow, adjusted the CPU cycles, still slow... That's nuts. I've used DosBox on a Pentium II 400 MHz machine (running SuSE Linux). It isn't good enough to play the faster/newer games well, but most of the games from around the time of 1993 or 1994 and earlier run fine.

Looks like you've got most of the problem solved. I wanted to mention that I have a dedicated PC that boots DOS (version 6.22) from a floppy disk. I got the image for the disk from bootdisk.com , and edited the config.sys and autoexec.bat files slightly. I installed a copy of Win98 on that computer, …