*Bonus trivia*
Will qemu-fast ever work with windows 98? Or does windows need to be
patched?
No. qemu-fast is designed for loading a linux kernel w/o any BIOS. In theory,
you could modify the source code of Windows so it would start out with a linux
like "kernel" bootstrapper (which also emulated all of the BIOS stuff) and then
have it load the rest of Windows. In reality, this is not going to happen.
(I suppose, if you are into the black arts, you could create a linux kernel-like
bootstrapper instead, and have that load up io.sys...) Also, the modified
Windows OS would need to use linux syscalls and mmap(). (Again, if you
are into the black arts, you could try patching the machine code...)