I strongly doubt that MSAA support is discountinued, you couldn't force it through dgvoodoo if that'd be the case.
Forcing MSAA is not recommended because then it applies to all of the 3d-rendered textures in the rendering process. A lot of texture don't even contain bitmap data but various vectors and other non-graphical data. Forcing them to be MSAA-ed and resolved later breaks the expected values and breaks the rendering itself. If a game supports MSAA then just use it through the game, it knows what particular buffers/textures are meant to be MSAA-ed, how to align the texture coordinates for them, etc.
You can try forced MSAA with an old DX7 game for example, to see if you still get black screen with that. Rendering-wise, forced MSAA behaves relatively good for them.