Many VirtualBox fans like to stomp their feet to declare Win98 being supported in their favorite VM software by means of a late third-party VESA1.x video driver but that's not stable and fully featured either (and VESA in Win9x wasn't really a thing then).

PCem's the only one that seems to be on track for this target you're wanting at acceptable speed. SBPCI 128 emulation was recently added and that's definitely a common Win98-era hardware product. Voodoo2 SLI's also handled and it's possible future Voodoo cards may be emulated (as, well..... 3dfx was one of the only companies to bother opening up specs and papers before their closure and they were ubiquitous anyway so it's most logical to emulate 3dfx, cult fandom and hype aside)

I was able to complete Half-Life from beginning to end in PCem last year without any major problems (other than HL's own bugs). 😀

Are you sure about PCem? I had a look at it and it seemed to be for 486 or older hardware. Is this a different fork? Thanks.

Yes I am sure. It goes beyond 486.

Thanks. I'll have a look at again and see why it doesn't seem to have the options for the Pentium series. Might have been a compile option.

They'll only show up if you have an Endeavor, Advanced/EV or 430VX bios. Pentium Overdrives also show up for the 486s

Only thing with PCem, Zorix, is you're gonna want a decent PC to be emulating high-end Pentium, no throwing a Raspberry Pi at this.

... "Linux host" isn't terribly detailed in explaining your host machine, and I usually assume the worst.😀

Well you can't compile PCem on a Pi as x86 architectures are required (can't compile with interpreters only currently), and you can't run VirtualBox on a Pi, so I think we can safely rule out the Pi....

I'll check my system when I get back to it, but it's probably the BIOS rom. I wonder if I can dump the BIOS roms from the older motherboards I have and use those in PCem. If not, I will find another way. I do plan on using a real PC, not a RPi or other SBC. I have an older Phenom II 965, and Ubuntu 16.04 currently. Didn't think I needed to go into details since I know how to operate and compile software on Linux, I just didn't want to get a suggestion for a Windows solution. But I think PCem is workable, if the performance is that bad, I'll look at compiling it with some optimizations, and if it's still an issue, I'll have to wait until I buy new hardware. The video card market right now is not helping that either!

Thank you both!