Past-proof PC?

[Gamevet]

There's still a potential hiccup with that though: the hardware.

Let's say you have a very advanced video card that handles Crysis 2 like a champ.... but then, oops, the Windows XP partition doesn't recognize it. Or perhaps the actual games don't.

Then again the idea mentioned elsewhere of just having two Win7 boot partitions might work.

Still, if I were the OP I would instead build an XP machine for games from 1999-2006 then worry about later games.... well... later.

It's as easy as swapping out your video card. It's still much better than having 2 PCs vying for you desk space. I do know this though; I could remove my GTX 780 Classified from my main rig, and throw in my old GTS 250, and it would work fine with Nvidia's drivers.

I don't think that having a modern graphics card, or sound card, would be a problem though. Origin hands out free old games all the time that are running through DOS Box. They've ran fine so far, though I think some of that old stuff wound be better on a crt. The problems I've had with running older games usually had to do with Direct X not supporting some of the features of older DX titles, and that is where having a secondary operating system with older drivers works out better.

I do have an old PCI NVidia FX-5200 Ultra I could throw in my 2009 HP Pavilion PC (Windows 7), to see if it would actually work with NVidia's modern drivers. The Intel onboard graphics could pretty much run anything from before 2000 quite easily though.