PC Emulators

I have been searching around and have found many PC emulators on the internet including VMware. I have read through many descriptions but my ignorance on the topic makes me hesitant in just randomly picking one. I was wondering if anyone here has had any experience is using emulators and may have some suggestions on a good emulator or even some key points to look at when picking one.

*EDIT* Wrong board, sorry for that. Thanks for moving it.

o_O
WMWare is not an emulator. If anything, it should be called a virtualizator. Emulation is quite different.
But I take it you mean you want to run another PC inside your PC, so to speak. A virtual OS. That's what these kinds of products were designed for.
It really depends on your needs. I think there used to be some free WMWare version, but generally it's quite complex. Microsoft also has their own--Microsoft Virtual PC or something. Long ago since I used it last, so I don't know how it works today.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I guess I do mean a virtualizer. Basically I want to play around with boot programming without actually testing things out on real hardware. I know I am going to get hiccups along the way and I don't want to trash anything real while I learn.

Always used VirtualBox myself.

Thanks for the reply, I just read through some of the documentation for VirtualBox. I'm not sure if I am reading it correctly but it seems you need to either have a CD or load an image file to run the guest OS. Is it possible just to experiment with a boot loader with VirtualBox, aka use the virtual HDD it creates to test out a boot loader?

You are probably better off using an emulator such as bochs for boot loader coding. OSDev contains loads of resources, everything from basic bootloaders to barebone kernels and so on.

Thanks Shakti, looks like a great place to start.