Did some more experiments... I got a very good pcem17 setup running.. I'll make a detailed post soon.. I just want to try a few more bios/cpu combos and see if it makes a difference...

Also, I have switched to using an app called imdisk. Basically the entire win98 OS can fit on small drives, and can easily sit on a RAM DISK. imDisk allows you to make a virtual disk drive that sits entirely in ram. Which is a lot faster than my SSDs. I mean it is super fast.

Anyway, PCem had issues loading off the ram disk, I mean it worked running a vm stored on a ram disk, but 86Box can actually run the application completely from the ramdisk. Meaning that when you dump the disk to local drive you end up with a nice neat single file. Just load it in imdisk and run the exe to load the vm.

The question is really how much of an improvement I get in the VM for running it off a ram disk. Without diagnostic software for 98 I will probably not be able to tell but I would say there should be an improvement. I know running VMware and Vbox I get a considerable boost from running in a ram disk, so not sure this would be different.

That being said I am not sure how much of the bottle neck is outside of the CPU anyway.

edit... you know now I think of it, as 86Box and PCem emulate the drive speed, it probably dose not help much at all?

I made my video on this emulator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJLzQPdzxo