I tried out about 100 games from the XP era on windows 10 and I got all but maybe 5 of them working, with probably 85% of them working pretty much perfectly.
Getting EAX back through software emulation is a giant pain. Even though I had the original discs, every game needed a no CD crack because none of the DRM works anymore. Many games require patches and tweaks in order to start at all. I ran into issues where some games would only work in windowed mode, and others only in full screen. Some needed frame limiters to not crash. Some would not work with AA or something. Serious Sam had weird graphical glitches in openGL, and D3D would run shockingly slow given my hardware. A few games required dgvoodoo 2 or nglide in order to get working. Even after all of that, some would refuse to work, leaving my last option to run XP in a virtual machine.
It was a pretty lengthy process of googling and testing to get each one up and running. I know that some of the games, partially from the no cd cracks I had to use, would crash or not complete the final level. This was pretty common to include intentionally in cracks back in the day "cuz pay for it" and "try before you buy *wink* *wink* " sentiments were common among pirates in the mid 2000's.
Windows 7 32bit supports disc DRM and some depreciated graphics libraries, but not by default. They have to be explicitly enabled. Windows 10 has removed support for a lot of stuff and relies heavily on the compatibility layer. For example, there is no native support for direct X 8.1 or later or direct draw, and while the compatibility layer works pretty well (all things considered), you can run into glitches and lots of added impact lag. GoG releases fix a lot of issues and are a great shortcut, but that often means buying a game you already paid for. GoG also doesn't have every game, so sometimes that isn't an option.
Sometimes, even fixes for old games won't work on later releases for windows. There are quite a few community patches I tried that apparently worked in windows 7 but would not work at all in my windows 10 machine. Worse yet, microsoft will break support with legacy software through update with no warning. The creator's update in 2018 I think is one example.
Here is a spreadsheet I created for myself just to keep notes on what I have done. It might give you an idea of what to expect.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oSWRc … dit?usp=sharing
I have more XP games in my collection, but I lost interest in the project after 100 games.
