system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What's the difference between an emulator and a virtual machine?

Also, if I were to run a different OS i.e. Windows 95 or Linux  on Windows 10, would that be possible for a virtual machine, an emulator, or both?
gpt
An emulator is anythign that tries to behave like something else and isn't necessarily a virtual machine if that emulated thing is not hardware.

A virtual machine can either be something that tries to present its own system image of the same architecture (emulates an i386 system while running on an i386; the CPU doesn't need to be emulated but various hardware pheriphreals need to be), a different architecture (i386 VM running on a PowerPC Macintosh, the CPU needs to be emulated), or a bytecode interpreter like the Java VM.

So a Java VM is not really an emulator as its not trying to pretend to be anything else, but it's a sort of virtual machine based on "imaginary hardware" in a sense.

VMware running x86 Windows on an x86 Linux host is a VM that's not emulating the CPU, but is emulating other things like disk controllers.

Something like WINE for example is not machine emulator or a VM, they're OS emulators (take the same API calls and try to do the same thing that Windows would do with them, etc.)

Windows 95 on Win10 (without using VMware etc) would require an "OS emulator" called WoW64 (Windows on Windows 64) that translates API calls similar to WINE.