Playing 95/98 games on a Vista?

There are a couple of games I fell in love with way back when the family '98 was up and running. Namely, Kings Quest: Mask of Eternity, and, more importantly, Myst. I've struggled to find a solution to my problem. When run, Myst (Masterpiece Edition) will open to a black screen with your pointer functioning and the audio looping cavernous wind noise. It will let you go to the top bar and open the menu. I also managed to navigate in the dark and select the first linking book. So, the game is basically functioning, but the visuals are not.

I have tried running it in 95 and 98 compatibility mode. By default I have Vista running in XP compatibility mode. I have tried running it as Administrator. I have tried fiddling with options in Myst.exe properties. None of that worked.

Since, I have tried running DOSBox, but found it far too confusing and found no confirmation whether it could even run Myst or not. So, giving up that, I tried installing the official Windows Virtual PC Beta, making sure to go into the Boot Menu to enable virtualization first. That won't run, telling me my computer doesn't require the update. Afterwards I installed VirtualBox and created a '98 system. However, when run, it doesn't recognize I have a CD in my drive, and says there is no medium to boot from... something along those lines.

Any help would be so appreciated. I am sick to death of struggling with this infernal machine.

DOSBox can run Myst (I've done it, and it runs perfectly). However, you need a copy of Windows 3.1 (maybe Windows 95, but 3.1 works best) installed in DOSBox to run it. As for KQ8, It may run in Wine, the Windows emulator for Linux. That may not help you much though, and beyond that I'd just try VirtualBox or some other virtualization program.