ux-3 wrote on 2024-05-20, 20:32:

I am not convinced that this is because of "youth rigs". If all software would work on todays hard and software just as well, many people wouldn't bother. It will be interesting in the future, when it is the games that are failing to run, not the machines. Likely, there will be no way back, even if you have the machine.

Yes and no.
Many people simply want to play the game and don't really care about hardware, os, etc itself. This was the original purpose of this forum and things like emulators.
However enough people DO care which is why old consoles are in demand and people here are building PC's to have the "complete" experience"

It'll be interesting when the currant generation reaches the nostalgia era, as you say games being tied to steam, etc makes things a bit more complicated but I've no doubt fan patches will be made just like we already have to get games running on newer OS's and bypass DRM.