Qemu
Qemu is an open source processor emulator. It emulates a variety of different CPUs and systems, and achieves good speed by using dynamic translation.
Reference
Articles
- Qemu on Linux: setting up and using Qemu under Linux
Some Quick Notes
- Creating the disk image:
qemu-img create win98hd.img 2G qemu -hda win98hd.img -cdrom win98.iso -boot d
For linux host systems, there is a loadable kernel module (called kqemu) that will allow qemu to run at near native speeds. At the time of this writing, there aren't distributed packages available with the module built, so you'll need to download the source from the website and compile it locally.
First download the qemu source and untar it. Then download the kqemu source and untar it within the qemu source directory. Then run ./configure && make && sudo make install. You might also want to install the vgabios package from your package manager.
Editor's note: I had this -- "If you're wanting to run Windows 98 under qemu, this option is moot because kqemu and Win98 don't get along." written here, but I think that only applies to kqemu and maybe qemu-fast (I'm not clear on what the difference is between the two).