I went through this with the MechWarrior 2 Titanium versions. All the VMs that support hardware acceleration only support it if the guest is Windows XP or later. Which doesn't solve the problem when the game doesn't work on XP or later.

Wine, though it doesn't work on Windows yet.
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows

Heck, sometimes it doesn't work on Linux, either. ;-)

The Titanium Trilogy games work just fine on XP with the patches on FileFront (MechWarrior 2, Ghost Bear's Legacy, Mercenaries).
I was able to get them working in VirtualBox with these patches, specifically, although other VMs may work too. Of course if you are still using XP as your host OS these should work fine natively anyway. They also sort of work on Vista and 7 but not always as you'd expect.
EDIT: when using these patches note that you must specify the hardware-accelerated version when installing and set Windows 95 compatibility on the game's executable. Both these steps need to be done this way for this patch to work at all.
If you can't get the game's installer to load past 99%, put Windows 95 compatibility on that too.

Wine always works on *nix, its just the software it is "translating" for that doesn't always work.

I'm running Vista, and these patches break heat build-up (so you can safely run without heatsinks o_O) in all games, and the mech lab in GBL. Do they not have these problems in XP?

People work on virtual machines instead usually. However anything Wine runs on is a candidate, I believe Wine has some support for older Windows APIs.

Not that I recall, no. They were only made with XP in mind so have some problems on later versions.

I agree, and I'm looking forward to see someone starting developing a proper WINBox project.....

Actually Windows 95 is runnable in DOSbox (fully supported by version 0.73) and I've even seen videos of Windows games running inside it (example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsGUZqCnI2A). So I kind of question why it would even be necessary to write something entirely new for it.

Funny you linked one of the Windows games that are very compatible with the latest version of Windows :-P
You're wrong: the DOSBox crew has a very definite goal, ie working out almost-perfect compatibility with MS-DOS games. Windows games are not included in this goal, and probably they will never be.
So a WINBox project will fork out, eventually....

Hmm, at max cycles, how fast is dosbox? I mean, like what cpu?
Also, if you install w95 on dosbox, what's the graphics card it sees and memory?
If it is only a standard vga, then one might as well stick with virtual pc, no?

On the fastest processor today DOSBox is equivalent to a Pentium 200+ computer in speed (rough guesstimate the latest processor DOSBox emulates is equivalent to a 486), it depends on the game (some code runs faster than others) but running Windows 95 in addition you lose alot of power since it has to run Windows 95 in addition to whatever game you want to run.
The graphics card DOSBox uses by default is the same as the one in VPC except better, DOSBox supports more video modes, has scalers, more output options and emulates more video cards.
Yeah you can stick with VPC if you don't mind gouging your ears out with toothpicks among other frustrations. Only use VPC for 9x games. Use DOSBox for DOS/Windows 3.1 games.

I still have all my original copies of Windows since 95, but I don't remember where I have my key for w95 or even if it had one lol.
Still, it might be worth it to try it one day.
Thanks.

If you owned it and just lost your key, just get one off the internet. Only the most hardcore copyright advocate would have a problem with that. Win 95 did not have any kind of phone home functionality.