I’ve been using VMWare exclusively for virtualization for old games, old dev environments, etc. forever. It’ll do what you need just fine. I think I started using VMWare when a story originally hit Slashdot 20+ years ago. I use kvm and xcp-ng mostly nowadays for professional work, but VMWare is tried and tested for Windows desktop use.

There’s really only two things you’ll run into:

* Games that rely on some esoteric third party library, that for whatever reason wasn’t included in the installer because it relied on a redistributable from Windows Update or the audio driver installer for the sound card. Rare, but happens. Almost always an audio library. Quick search will find it on abandonware sites. Think I’ve done this for 2-3 games ever, last one being Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol.

* Games that relied on early DirectDraw (not DirectX) and were released before Windows 2000, and used fade in/out effects. With how DirectX was changed under the hood for the NT 5.0 kernel in Windows 2000, it ends up being a slideshow. This isn’t a virtualization issue, but a Windows 2000 or later instead of Windows ME or prior issue — you’d see the same issue on 20-25 year old hardware (I did back then)! However this is super rare. I think the only game I have affected by this is the installer (not the game itself) for Dark Reign, which was an RTS by Relic.