The funny thing is, 98se and XP were made to be rather stable but the underground patching projects weren't really well known until after 2010 when retro became "cool". 98se in particular has a lot of things done to make it very nice to run old games. The guy doing XP Integral has gone so far that I can install it off a flash drive directly to my current system with NVMe, USB3, everything and even run a modern version of a Firefox fork. That includes all 32GB of RAM but I'd be limited to a Titan X Maxwell and I'd need to source an Audigy RX for sound (which is a modern card with official XP drivers for EAX). I have the latest version installed on a Q9550 overclocked with 8GB of DDR2, a PCI-E SSD, and one of my TItan X cards and it's really snappy with 0 crashes. It's honestly an awesome experience, and there's a project out there for Vista too.