The only time you have to worry about things potentially breaking is:

if/when DRM is installed or if multipled versions of that DRM is installed. Nice thing about 64bit Windows is the DRM included with alot of these older games doesn't work anymore so you'll have to install the latest DRM (Safedisc, SecuROM, etc) for their respective websites.

Old/buggy uninstallers that delete things they shouldn't (doesn't happen very often but it only takes once).

The OS will "break" your game long before the games break the OS.

I've tested a ton of games on Windows (see my Compatibility List) and have never had a game break an NT OS.

99% of windows 95/98/me/xp games will run on on windows 7
Some will not install on win7 x64 because the install programs are 16bit
So you would need to install them in a 32bit o/s or a vm and copy them over.

And to add to your Wine comment...that too runs a hell of a lot of the older games, some even that struggle on windows. Biggest advantage of wine..you can store them in separate containers so they are totally separate from the OS. Biggest drawback? You may have to install a virus scanner just because it runs windows software

Thanks, looks like it's better than I thought.

Davros wrote:

Some will not install on win7 x64 because he install programs are 16bit
So you would need to install them in a 32bit o/s or a vm and copy them over.

Sometimes it is more involved than that. Many Windows games require registry entries or an INI in the Windows directory. Some require some systems files to be written. For Windows games that use a 16-bit installer, it is best to track the original installer to catch everything it does to duplicate it on the target system. While most of my installers are for DOS games, I have several Windows game installers, too. These either require patching, compatibility fixes, ship with 16-bit installers or some combination of these issues. For the games with 16-bit installers I use XP Mode with a tracker to create a log of all of the changes to create a new 32-bit installer.

New Sierra/Sierra Family installers

I have done a few non-Sierra games: http://sierrahelp.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=3925

Windows protects its system files from changes and has since Windows ME. You're unlikely to break the system by installing/uninstalling older applications. It is not impossible for it to happen nor is it impossible for your harddisk to suddenly fail one day. Neither should be amongst your worries: keep backups of anything important.

As for actually running games, 99% of them usually run fine. I'm testing random games under Windows 8.1 now and every game I've tried runs as well as they did on the OS they were made for. Worst problems are as mentioned 16-bit installers and more complex driver-based DRM.

Getting older games to work isn't necessarily straightforward. There are lots of workarounds for compatibility issues and you might not know about all of them. If you find a game that does not work I recommend asking here before giving up.

One tip I'd give, install old games to a separate "Games" folder, rather than "program files" or "program files (x86)". Windows Vista (quite rightly) tightened security with Windows and now programs aren't usually permitted to write to the program files folder. Of course older games do this all the time for save games and configuration settings.

This is more sensible/secure than running the game as administrator when you don't need to, or worse still disabling UAC, and easier than fiddling with folder permissions yourself.

first, its highly unlikely any game will actually break Windows 7 , as mentioned previously , the NT based systems are solid.

in regards to games actually working, that depends not just on Windows 7 (and Im assuming you mean 64bit) , but also on other things such as drivers.
its not even necessarily a specific year or OS , Tiberian Sun for instance works fine on Win7 , while Max Payne1 and 2 had issues even starting. on my AMD 6870 (and Ive heard Nvidia cards didn't have that issue).

likewise quite a few 2D games from the late 90s won't look right without some sort of modification , one example being Starcraft , which without the right fixes has distorted colours making the game almost unplayable.

however you are very much likely to get games to work if they have one or more of these features

1)designed to be compatible with NT4.0/2000 (sometimes it doesn't even say it on the box, but it helps).
2) is a DX8 or 9 game, those generally work better with newer drivers.
3) of course, if there are fan fixes and patches for the game, some games might have fanmade installers since the official installers fail to run on a 64bit OS, NFSIII being one example.

if you want to run older games on newer hardware though , it might be useful to dual boot a copy of WinXP on the PC, most new hardware still has support for WindowsXP (apart from things like DX11 support, but older games don't need that of course) , and alot of the compatibility issues will disappear.

The only things to possibly watch out for are Starforce protected games, as if you install some of the older Starforce drivers then reboot, it'll either rollback your installation or kill Windows. See the games list here: http://forum.daemon-tools.cc/gamedb.php?letter=all

The way to get round it is to install the game, uninstall Starforce (I think manually, by finding and deleting Registry keys and .dll files, I have a guide backed up somewhere, though they also have an official Starforce uninstaller here http://www.onlinesecurity-on.com/protect.phtml?c=55), then replace the game's main exe file with a no-CD version (which you can find in various places online).

There's also a few cases where a Win98-era game would not work on Windows XP but works on 7 x64.

Starforce games generally refuse to run if you're on a 64-bit OS. Sometimes (but rarely) they do have Starforce-less rereleases on Steam 😀

Of course, even if a particular game runs perfectly under your version of Windows, it may not run on your specific system.

For me, Need for Speed II Special Edition works perfectly on every single XP system I've tried it on, except my own. I have tried a ton of different settings in the Application Compatibility Toolkit and nothing I do has gotten the software rendered version to work properly. I can get it to run, but the moment I get close to any other car on the road, the game turns into a slideshow. I did manage to get the Glide version working though.

Rekrul wrote:

Of course, even if a particular game runs perfectly under your version of Windows, it may not run on your specific system.

For me, Need for Speed II Special Edition works perfectly on every single XP system I've tried it on, except my own. I have tried a ton of different settings in the Application Compatibility Toolkit and nothing I do has gotten the software rendered version to work properly. I can get it to run, but the moment I get close to any other car on the road, the game turns into a slideshow. I did manage to get the Glide version working though.

It seems to be an issue with your video drivers 2D mode, something else than ACT. Do you have the regular version of NFS2? It's worth to test it as well, just to make sure.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

It seems to be an issue with your video drivers 2D mode, something else than ACT. Do you have the regular version of NFS2? It's worth to test it as well, just to make sure.

No, unfortunately I don't. I only have the special edition.

When I first tried installing it, the Glide version did the exact same thing. It would appear to start normally, except that there was a brief stutter as the camera zoomed up to the car at the start of the race, then everything would seem normal, except that as soon as you caught up to the other cars, it was like you were trying to run it on an old XT system. The framerate dropped to about 1-2 FPS. Of course then you'd crash into something, get left behind and the game would go back to normal speed. Until the next time.

I did try applying the same ACT settings that fixed the Glide version to the software version, but they didn't seem to help.

I haven't had anything like this happen with any other non-3D program that I've run, such as emulators.

I, rarely... had Gunmetal completely hardlock windows 7. I was experimenting with ACT to see if I was missing a fix to make the game a little more stable, ended up having it freeze out the whole machine, not even ACPI power button events did anything...

So there's always that risk with old games apparently, why they're able to do that to something so modern as Windows 7 disturbs me.

I have gunmetal running fine on win 7
this one (there are 2 gun metal games)
http://www.mobygames.com/game/gun-metal

I'm talking about the one by Mad Genius Software... There is no space in the name.

It says it's for MS-DOS, Windows 95 & 98 but the DirectX binary supplied with this game is unstable beyond unstable, it's only really able to be played stably under pure MS-DOS.