That's not a bad idea. Similar to what I've been trying since, but with a slightly different take on it. I'll file it away as a potential future solution, but for now I'm not willing to repartition my very new workhorse laptop just to make this work. Since the drives use a serial port, I'd also be using a USB to serial adapter. Those sometimes inject problems too.
I did discover that it installs fine on a VirtualBox Windows XP installation, which lends credibility to your suggestion. I'm not sure if it will actually talk to the hardware from there, but so far I've been very impressed with the integration they've managed.
My best bet, and the one I've been working on this evening is to set up an old laptop (circa 1996) with a physical serial port and a 2GB hard drive. Want to guess where my snag was with this? Getting the installation file onto the computer! None of my USB drives worked, as they're too new and don't have '98 drivers. The laptop doesn't have WiFi, so that's out. 3-1/2" floppy and CD-ROM, yes.... but nothing else to generate them, and the 53MB+ installation file ruled out the 1.44MB floppy from the start. I did have a PCMCIA Ethernet adapter, so there's that.... but do you think that Windows 10 wants to play nicely with this on the network and share files? Of course not. The solution turned out to be pretty Rube Goldberg, but worked.
On new Windows 10 laptop:
VirtualBox running Windows XP SP3, connected to the physical wired ethernet port, network cable straight to the old laptop. Both are set to static IP addresses and the same subnet.
Old laptop:
Just had to set the static IP. It didn't know any better to complain.
Ah, beautiful obsolescence. I wonder if anyone under 20 would be able to figure out how to work with all this old hardware.
I'll see if this was all in vain tomorrow.