Also have we gotten to the point that all Pentium 3 slot 1 cpus over 500mhz are ridiculously expensive?? There is a guy selling a 1ghz 100mhz fsb coppermine for 900 dollars on ebay!!??

If it were me I wouldn't develop on 9x but the latest and greatest and then compile that code to work on the older OS.
If for some cases that wouldn't work then I'd still find the latest OS I could get away with that the dev tools would work with and use that. Windows: NT4/2000 Terminal Services, XP+ RDP
If I absolutely had to develop on 9x then I'd do so using Linux KVM with 9x as a guest on whichever distro (Proxmox for me) and then use passthrough to a GPU attached to a monitor or last resort use VNC or Spice (Yes you can use spice with a vesa driver on 9x).
If for some reason that didn't work for whatever reason and/or I wanted the OS bare metal on the hardware that supported it that I wanted to access remotely then I'd look into using a IP KVM.
If you don't want to use a IP KVM you can look into finding a VNC server that works on 9x along with a client that works on whatever OS you are using to access it. The downside of this is you are relying on the CPU, NIC of the PC as well as likely ancient RMM software on a unstable OS.

For me VNC is shit compared to RDP. It is "good enough" to do what you want to do but I wouldn't use it for desktop usage for hours of work. It may depend on the client/server being used but every one I've used downloaded or supplied with an OS are horrible. So if you go the IP KVM route make sure you read reviews, forums or ask system administrators. You do not need an additional monitor for an IP KVM since you can use a client or the browser on your main machine.

Are you saying there is no RDP for win9x??

The reason for 9x is becuase it is the last windows to support 32 and 16 bit. XP is the absolute last OS compatible with some of these tools, it just doesnt support dos/win16, kind of sucks for assembly. Having an old PC is also cool becuase i can mess around with ISA/PCI card design.

A kvm isnt an option becuase i have no space for a monitor, my main gaming pc is plugged in to a TV and mostly used with gamepad/bt keyboard. I do most of my work on a laptop, it has a geforce 5050 and runs cachey/win11, I just can not get qemu/kvm to pass gpu easily. I cant remmber what the deal was but i was trying to run win11 on kvm and just couldnt get gpu pass through working the way i wanted, after 2 weeks of trying i folded to dual boot.

I think an OLD copy of Symantec PC Anywhere is what i need, even works with win 3.11! That at least solves the software part of the puzzle.