So close, and yet so far away.  I’m using a ‘restore’ image to do this.. Basically I have an existing OS/2 1.21 machine that I made a backup of, using MS-DOS & OS/2.  I restore the MS-DOS backup with an altered config.sys that dumps me to a cmd.exe prompt with no Presentation Manager.  Then I restore the OS/2 image onto itself and then reboot into OS/2.  I know it works since I’ve used this to setup OS/2 onto VirtualBOX & a physical PC before.  Qemu boots half way through but the letter ‘o’ is corrupted for some reason, and the keyboard doesn’t respond once it’s booted.  But the cursor blinks away like it is waiting for you to type anything.  It is worth noting that OS/2 1.x doesn’t know what IDE CD-ROM’s are, and you have to remove the physical drive to boot this up.

Oh well it is a shame.