Pitfall the Mayan Adventure was on Genesis (MegaDrive), Super Nintendo, and PC for Windows 95. It requires the CD to be in the drive in order to read audio. I tried a variety of methods including virtualbox that worked to varying degrees. But I find a solution that provided a better gameplay experience and better audio. Not all of these steps may be necessary, but I found it’s what worked for me.
Copy the contents of the CD to a folder on your PC. Go into the Assets folder and change the compatibility settings of PITFALL.EXE, and set it to run in Windows XP (Service Pack 3) mode. I also set it to 8-bit color, disable fullscreen optimizations, and Run as Administrator. That said, I’m not sure the last 3 are necessary.
Add the dlls from dgvoodoo2 to the ASSETS folder. These override the newer graphic APIs with earlier versions.
Run PITFALL.EXE directly from the ASSETS folder. The CD will still need to be in the drive, for the audio to work.
Lastly, rather than trying to figure out the joystick interface in the settings, I used xpadder to configure my controller to use the keys from the keyboard settings.