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I personally found PCem and 86Box quite limited performance-wise. It tends to struggle beyond a pentium/pentium ii. I understand you need to have a CPU with quite beefy single-core/thread performance.
Windows XP will run on intel systems up to ivy bridge, and Nvidia GPUs up to a 980ti (needs some tweaks to the drivers if beyond 960) – so if you’ve got an old PC lying around from that era it could be a viable option and should cover games from 2000 onwards pretty comfortably. That narrows your incompatibility window to ~96-99. Most early windows games were really DOS games and so DOS box serves well into 97 or so.
I find the early win 95 era the trickiest, where some games won’t even run natively in win 98 (I haven’t been able to get interstate ’76 to run on windows 98, for example).
One cool method I’ve seen is to use a PCIe-PCI converter (or a motherboard with native PCI slots) and pass-through a period-correct graphics card and sound card to a virtual machine. See here for an example using Unraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgIF8uG-2G0 . A bit of a middleground between using old hardware and new. Probably not practical for most of us (and to be honest unless you can get a Voodoo3 PCI the graphics options mostly suck), but still a cool concept.
The folks over at VOGONS (very old games on new systems) are also a great source of help on this topic :-).
