Bochs
I'm currently playing with Bochs as a way of having a baby machine inside my real machine. I don't have a good estimation of how fast it's running, because it's installing the new OS on the emulated machine. What is impressive is how easy it was to get things to that stage. Simply grab the example config file, tweak a little, and have the emulated machine boot of a real CD-ROM.

I'm curious to see whether the performance of the virtual machine is fast enough for what I'd like to do with it, which is primarily to run Windows applications in a restricted environment, and good ol' games that have a hard time running on newer operating systems. I'd love to use plex86, but the project is only intending to emulate linux from linux, which doesn't suit my needs in this particular case.

So far I've installed 31% of the required files for my windows install while writing this journal entry. I don't know if that's good or bad, I can't remember how long windows installs usually take.

I wonder if running two copies of an MS operating system at the same time on the same physical hardware poses a licensing issue?