What made those days tricky was that windows was usually installed over Dos. Some of the games were designed to run in Dos, but even the ones that were designed to use in windows did not run properly without dos. When you go to the setup menu in those games they were looking for “Soundblaster” cards and such. The games were talking directly to the sound card and the video card even though they were running under windows. The emulator or whatever has to trick the game into thinking those cards exist and also emulate them into windows. Otherwise the games won’t run properly if at all.
I don’t know much about VM but I will try to checkout your link.