Well technology has changed a lot from those days. VM is running multiple OS's on a machine, while emulating the ST or C64 and such can be just running a bit of software that can run open the old applications and games for those older machine.  But it depends on the emulator, some indeed VM's, but they name them emulators, but in reality they are VM's running the old OS on your machine.

 

It's a fine line, since computers can handle a lot more today then in those days. Back at that time, most of those home computers like the ST, C64, MSX did not have the hardware to run another OS inside their OS, so they had to emulate. When PC's became more powerfull they could do it, but the word emulator stuck, since it's much cooler then virtual machine. When emulators came out first, they took over the whole pc and trying to switch between a real windows application and an emulator would either cause a crash or the pc would become completely unresponsive. But now we can assign applications to their own memery space much better, so it isn't a problem anymore. Some of the emulators are still written as real emulators, but the pc it's running on changed so much that the emulator doesn't need to take over the whole thing. But even with those, I've noticed that some of them aren't to happy when you start switching applications a lot. While the ones written as VM's, but just called emulator for name sake, behave much better.

 

At any rate, they're and at times it's really fun to play those old games or look at those old simple applications, that were easy to use and actually made sense. They indeed do have a certain charm.

Artwork and 3DToons items, create the perfect place for you toon and other figures!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?vendor=23722

Due to the childish TOS changes, I'm not allowed to link to my other products outside of Rendo anymore :(

Food for thought.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYZw0dfLmLk