In a recent attack of nostalgia, I attempted to try and get SuSE Linux 7.0 running in a virtual machine, the first GNU/Linux distro I ever used. I could not find a an emulator and combination of settings that would run the system in a useful manner and gave up after a few hours. IIRC, the main problem was the graphics card, because I did not want to be stuck at 640x480 at 16 colors or something. :(
I've been having similar issues with Windows 3.11; trying to boot a qemu image I made a few years back and it looks like networking has died in the meantime, and another image crashes when it exceeds some small amount of RAM usage. But at least there's nothing stopping us from running an older linux in qemu to easily use an older qemu version that way, avoiding the hassle of having to patch the source to work with recent versions of its dependencies.
Actually, an old friend of mine works on long term archival of computing environments, and they still use a patched version of qemu 2.0 (iirc) for older systems for these reasons.
You could try bochs. It's a full-blown emulator and probably much slower, but it might do a better job at giving 1990s software a comfortable environment.
