NT 4 had NTVDM and it worked well enough. Quake 1, command and conquer, sim games for DOS and a bunch of other stuff worked just fine. You'd run into issues with timing on crappier games or some games that talked directly to soundcards I forget what the details were but you'd just not have audio.
I had a gravis ultrasound at the time and remember having to cut the reset signal line on the card.
I could then initialise the card in DOS and reboot into NT without it being reset and losing settings. Then some sketchy modified driver was able to use it.
I remember NT4 having problems with games that wanted to access SVGA resolutions and SoundBlaster. I kept a volume with Win98 back then specifically for the games.
