Quote Originally Posted by Gamevet View Post
Guys, he's not looking for a PC to run old DOS games. He's looking for a PC that will pretty much run games from Windows 98 to Windows in 2015.
That's not really possible. If you have a 2015 PC running Windows 10 and capable of running Steam which is a massive resource hog, you're going to have a very difficult time running anything from 10 years ago and older. Sure, some popular games can still work on Windows 10, but many more had trouble even with Vista and 7, those games usually don't work on 10 because it has even less legacy support.

The problem stems from whether the game in question once relied upon Windows 9x, which was only ever partially supported in Windows NT over the years. Windows 2000 was pathetic, XP was vastly improved but still not a complete replacement. Vista, 7 and onward kept reducing 9x support. The problem got worse when 16-bit EXE support was dropped thanks to the move to 64-bit. Even some (supposedly) 32-bit 9x games don't work properly anymore.

DOS is very easy thanks to DOS box. Win9x is a bitch and a half by comparison. Your choices consist of legacy support built into Windows 10 (which isn't very good), a Virtual Machine running XP or Windows 98SE/ME (requires an obscenely powerful PC, to the point of just being a waste of money and hardware) and lastly an older physical PC (I highly recommend this).

Yes, not everyone likes older technology ruining their modern lives, but if you want to play Win9x games, you'll have a tough time getting them to work on PCs from this decade.

In case anyone doesn't know, Win9x and NT are not the same thing, at all. Win9x is built on top of MS-DOS and consists of the Win32 API, the 16-bit subsystem and the MS-DOS Manager. It is essentially a heavily modified front end for DOS, think of it as the Genesis and 32X. Windows NT is a completely unrelated OS that has no subsystems or underlying DOS-like architecture, its Win32 API is also entirely different. One complaint I often hear from Win9x fans is WinNT has no emergency backdoor for fixing the OS, due to the lack of DOS.

I'm seriously tempted to list one of my Dell Latitude D600s fully loaded with drivers, games and all that good stuff, just to prove that retro PC gaming can be a thing too.