Unirefresh.... What a great program that would have been.... but my video card doesn't support VESA 3.0 only VESA 2.0 according to Unirefresh. Anyway I happened across VirtualPC 5.2 Trial and have been playing with it. The sound emulation is a little tinny, but so was the sound on my old Packard Bell. I've set up guest PC's for MS-DOS 6.22, WFW 3.11, Win95, Win98, WinME and Win2000Pro and Mandrake 8.0 (Yes, I actually bought all of these OS's over the years, except Win95 which a friend gave me when he toasted his old Dell laptop and WinME which my dad gave me, it came via coupon with his Compaq he bought right when MS was switching from 98SE to ME, he stayed with 98SE). So far I've only run into two games that I can't either get to run with VDMS in XP or on the MS-DOS VPC. Those games are Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck Rampage. Both use the same sound setup and both crash when you test the sound in setup, if you skip that step, both freeze on the first screen of the game. I even installed updated SB16 drivers on the MS-DOS and Win98 VPC. Both games run fine without sound.
I had 98 installed on my machine when I first built it (had to take ndis.vxd off the WinME disk to get it to work with networking installed and had to tell 98 that I only had 512K of memory, kind of a waste when I had put 1gig in it and had to disable hyper-threading in BIOS). Machine ran rock-solid, but I still had video card issues with some games.
Everyone is right in that if I really wanted to run all these old games I should just build an old machine. I have access to tons of old pc equipment thru my father-in-law's salvage/restoration business and could probably do so for about $40-$50 without a monitor, but space on my desk gets kind of tight with two machines and two monitors, printer and scanner. Virtual PC for $129 (ver. 2004 is supposed to be out by the end of the year, which is good because my trial ends in 13 days) looks expensive at first glance, but being able to put to use just about all the software I've bought over the years, share folders, share internet connections, play old games, switch in and out of OS's with the click of a mouse, not worry about screwing up my machine's OS and do it all on one machine makes it look like a bargain to me.