PCem

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Do you know PCem

Pc emulator or virtual pc right? What do you need to know?

What virtual operating systems does it support

There's an ongoing thread about it on VOGONS: http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=16441

I've looked into it before, but it seems to be really complicated to set up, not to mention the lack of recent builds that just so happen to have all the features I'm actually interested in, like 3DFX emulation.

Does PCem support Windows 8 as a guest operating system?

I don't see why it would. I think it only emulates 80486-level CPUs at the most, which would mean OSes like DOS, Windows 95, maybe Windows NT 4.

If you want to run Windows 8 as a guest OS, try VMWare or Virtualbox, they're much better suited for that sort of thing.

What about Windows 7 does Windows 7 support as a guest opreating system?

Windows 7 has almost the exact same system requirements as Windows 8. Like I said, Virtualbox or VMWare would work much better for what you want to do. They are virtualization programs, so instead of doing straight-up emulation, they run the guest OSes side by side like programs, so they don't take a lot of power to run. PCem is an emulator on the other hand, so it manually tries to simulate a whole computer through raw computation, and even to emulate an ancient 486 or Pentium 1 system, it takes a lot of power.

Like Windows Vista and windows XP?

Vista is almost exactly the same OS as Windows 7, just with a few slight differences. I don't know if XP would run on PCem, as it requires a few Pentium-level instructions, but if it did, it would probably run quite slowly. I've seen videos on YouTube where people would install XP on systems running Socket 3 Pentium Overdrive processors, which are essentially Pentiums shoehorned into working on 486 motherboards, and they would purposefully disconnect the fans to underclock them. XP would crawl on these machines, and take hours just to bring up the desktop.

You can also use Virtualbox or Virtual PC which are free tools to make and run virtual clients on your desktop. There is also VMWare Workstation which is pretty professional in comparison, and it supports many operating systems, but it costs money.

If you have a physical server at home - or a virtual one in a cloud, you can install VMWare VSphere on it, but you need to install VCenter locally to connect to it. This is also a free solution (as long as you do not expect to run lots of virtual hosts on it with lots of memory).

Note: Only thing you cannot do is to run modern games, there is currently not much supporting high end graphics support in any virtualisation system. You can run older 16 bit games in an emulator with Windows XP, i do that with some older stuff i do not want to lose. I have tried running multiple copies of a MMORPG with VMWare, Virtual PC and Virtualbox, but none supported the graphics, got pretty much the same results with most other games i tried.

Does it support Windows 95 as a guest operating system

Windows 95 works as far as I know.

And doesn't Windows 95 have Sound Drive on PCem

I think PCem does Sound Blaster AWE32 emulation, so you should be able to get audio on Windows 95 with it.

Cool! And does it support Windows 98 as a guest Operating System?