The cartridge fork emulators help a ton, but it may be hard to justify the expense and effort on a 20+ year old bike.
On your old fork, the damping is controlled by oil flowing through holes in the bottom of the damping rod. The clickers on the bottom of your fork control the opening, but even wide open, the oil can't flow through fast enough on a sharp hit, and the fork can lock up or be very harsh when the fork has to move fast, even with the soft spring. This is a real problem on roots and rocks.
With the emulator, you drill the holes in the damping rod out so they are much larger and can flow way more oil (this step requires complete disassembly of the fork, so that's a pain). The emulator itself is a device with holes in it that sits on top of the damping rod, and beneath the fork spring. As the oil flows up the damping rod, then it has to pass through the emulator. A plate with a threaded bolt covered by a spring sits over the holes in the emulator, and controls the oil flow.
You can adjust the tension on the emulator spring and tune the damping, but you need to remove the fork springs to fish out the emulator.
Your clickers on your fork do not work after you put the emulator in, and the only wat to adjust them is to remove the fork spring (no trail side adjustment at all). But when it is dialed in, it works way better than the old fashioned damping rod system.