When I last tried Bochs for games on this quad-core system, it performed roughly 486DX2 66-ish. Understandable, given it's supposed to be a pure "clean" C portable emulator that most people seem to recommend for some reason probably because it exists and has a lot of marketing blurb on its own site. Don't expect it to be full-speed magic. Bochs serves better for educational purposes for developers than for entertainment use.

Even if it performs badly I still want to see how stable it performs with a few specific games and programs.

I also like how QEMU is mentioned as being "extremely experimental under windows", as if it could break your PC or something.

If you want to kick off with a 2GB image, you should start with the one attached to the post in Windows 9x DOSBox Guide (Not officially supported) .

Beyond that, it's fairly straightforward – mount the HD image, mount your bootable floppy image, etc.