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Accelerated writes are now working:

Very nice! That's the card with the 8088 on board for acceleration, right?

8088 is for 'intelligence', acceleration of writes is done in hardware -- quoting IBM Systems Journal article:

Writing to one of addresses in 0x32020--0x3203f range triggers the acceleration on next memory write. Pull request coming soon

Hello

Please excuse such a beginners question. I went through the manual, the Wiki, this thread, but could not find an answer.
So far I played with specific machines (IBM XT for example). Now I wanted to play with specific software and choose a matching IBM Clone.

Some people apparently use the "ct486", which seems to be a generic PC, unrelated to any other machine (at least -listbrothers or -listclones reveals nothing).
This driver runs fine, and is good for software of the DOS / Windows 3 area. For Windows 95, at least a Pentium or better a Pentium II would be a better match.

As a Pentium machine the "at586" exists, but is listed as "not working". This one is embedded in the "ibm5170" universe.

It appears that the Intel Pentium II and Pentium III are coded, but I can't find a machine that actually uses one of these CPUs.

Finally the question: What machine would be a good choice for the late 90ies (Win 95-98, OS/2 Warp 3 etc.)?

I believe MAME defaults for ct486 are more than enough for running Windows 95. According to W95 official requirements anyway.

As you noticed, at586 is not working yet*, so for games that required a Pentium 1 to run decently, MAME won't do. Look for alternatives (PCem, virtualization software, Direct3D wrappers...).
*more accurate information below

at586 can run, but it's slower because we don't yet have a JIT for x86. ct486 and at486 are the recommended "sweet spot" for getting your Gold Box games in and so on.

Give PCem a shot until MAME matures some - it's quite good. I've even managed to install Windows XP with some recent cdrom fixes committed to the tree, and it works surprisingly well. On an emulated Pentium 233, Voodoo 2 and a functional network card, no less.

DOS/V 6.2 now works!

I found an OS/2 v3 CD and it installs fine in recent MAME, but doesn't seem to like any of SVGA devices -- clgd542x, svga_et4k are not detected by the OS driver, gfxultra is detected but startup hangs sometime after loading Ring 0 driver, &c

(A list of drivers bundled with v3 -- http://www.elhvb.com/mobokive/eprm/eprmx/12218.htm)

Sound Blaster 16 does work but playback stutters.

Hence the plain vanilla screenshot:

Ebay auction no. 253930543330 is an 8bit IBM VGA card, the ROM is marked as BAD DUMP in the source. While I'm not going to shell out 175€ for that card, at least the photos are very clear and might be interesting.