First post, by pseudo3d
Tried asking this somewhere else but it was removed because it didn't fit the subject. Anyway, here goes. I have several older Maxis games (SimTower, SimFarm, SimAnt) with CD-ROMs.
In particular, I want to install SimTower (from 1995) on my Windows 7 computer; unfortunately, it and other games from that era come with a SETUP.EXE file, which Windows refuses to run on basis of being too old. Luckily, I found a cryptic text (SETUP.INF) that describes how the process would go.
So for instance, the main EXE is "SIMTOWER.EX_" and compressed (about 2.4MB, which is about the half the size of the Mac version, which is 4MB, though that may arguably come pre-packed with the separate DLL files the PC version uses). Renaming this file to .EXE and running it in compatibility mode does nothing, but it may be compressed.
If I can't get the SETUP.EXE file to run under any circumstances, I at least want to try to extract the files manually to run them. I don't really have access to an older machine, unless there's a particularly easy way to set up a virtual machine that I can extract them from.