Tips for Installing Windows 98 in Qemu/utm

In one video I've seen UTM used mouse emulation without absolute positioning: it treated the screen surface as a giant trackpoint nub and you could move away from the current location with variable speed. A native on-screen keyboard is also available.

For absolute positioning a USB input device is emulated, so this might not work in Windows 98 without a suitable driver: https://docs.getutm.app/preferences/ios/#cursor

Why would it handle any differently than a trackpad?

Most non-multitouch touchscreen devices emulate a mouse if there is not a more specific driver available. Trackpads were widely available on laptops at the time and you could jump to any point on the screen with those.

You can click but don't expect any gestures to work.

One really big advantage of DOSBox is that it has Ad Lib emulation. DOSBox is kinda weird and broken when it comes to trying to run Win9x though. It's good when it works at least.

iDOS3 is a great DOSBox iPad app. Not sure if it’s available in the US due to all of the Apple shenanigans.

It's true that qemu doesn't aim for fidelity. (Despite the name, qemu isn't exactly an emulator!) The development efforts upstream are almost all about getting modern OSes to work well, and quite often the OS is aware that it's running on qemu and adjusts itself - most notably with the installation of virtio drivers, but also in smaller ways. The Linux kernel has over 1000 references to QEMU in its source code.

Also if you look at qemu's device emulation, that's usually "done" when it can run modern operating systems. Qemu doesn't try hard to emulate the entire IDE or SCSI command set in every detail, or every aspect of old hardware.

Another thing is that qemu is not cycle-accurate at all. Instruction and device timings will be wildly different from real hardware, especially if using TCG.

If you need to emulate (and not virtualize) have a try at pcem.

It's a marvelous piece of engineering which is slower than others, but that's the price to pay for accuracy.

There is a superior emulator: x86box

The differences between the different "hardware of the time" are larger than between any of the emulators you mention. This is not consoles where the hardware is exactly the same over and over. PC hardware is mostly poor clones of poor clones of the original under-specified hardware and even software emulators of such clones whose only thought of compatibility amongst each other is "does Windows boot already?" (and most specially in the 98 era) . Go and ask Linux...

In fact, (having worked for quite a while in supporting decades old enterprise software) my experience with most PC virtualizers and emulators is that they're ridiculously accepting of errors that will most definitely trigger random behavior in (at least some) real hardware.

The problem would be games/software that moves to DOS mode and tries to use SB16 MIDI then

Context: Win98 doesn't do anything with CPUs that support the HLT instruction, so even when the emulated cpu could be idle it's using 100% of your cpu.