Now, I don't know about these vmware/MS VirtualPC/etc thingies, but surely they cannot allow applications to really go directly hacking with the hardware?

Yes, they can. Of course, the applications will not be hacking with the _actual_ hardware of the PC, but with something that's, well, virtual, but behaves just like the real thing, as far as the "guest" operating system is concerned.

Of course, this system isn't going to be a speed demon (it's not totally slow, either, since it is not an emulator - most code does run natively on the CPU), but I don't think this is going to be a big concern when running programs from 20 years ago.


Basically, you have a little PC running inside the big PC. You can run one operating system (Win/Dos/Linux) "inside" another.