ReactOS and Wine are pretty much as far as it goes these days. HX DOS Extender is another option, but there's no sound support for that currently and there probably never will be.

See also Will there ever be a practical WindowsBox program? .

As regards Wine, I have had plenty of success running old windows games in Wine. I have a collection of over 400 games from the 1997-2002 era and of that i have listed 378 running perfectly.
I'm not really into all these new games to be honest too much eye candy over playability since 2006

I guess the other factor I'm probably interested in would be Windows screensaver support. I think ReactOS has such, but I'm unclear as things like DirectX come into play.

If I'm not mistaken, Windows screensavers are just standard Windows executables with a different extension.

As per what Jorpho said, as regards wine windows screensavers can be used in Wine, although obviously i havent tested many screensavers recently 😀

It still does not solve the 16-bit stuff on x64 problem.

collector wrote:

It still does not solve the 16-bit stuff on x64 problem.

I was thinking of ReactOS for that. My current issues there seem to be...
-Limited networking support, which makes getting content into ReactOS a pain, handled by burning/mounting ISO images at the moment.
-General instability, I'm seeing various hangs just running ReactOS's out of the box screensavers. So I'm guessing I'll run into issues with other things.

collector wrote:

It still does not solve the 16-bit stuff on x64 problem.

Actually with wine I have never had that problem installing 16bit applications. That error you get in windows has never popped up for me in wine as i tend to use 32bit wine versions anyway even though I am on a 64bit system. You can, just like windows select which version of windows to start from windows 3.1 to window 8

Unless Resident evil 1 works under Wine with no problems, I don't see it as being that impressive... Okay maybe it still is, but still.

Resident Evil does run well in Wine albeit in software only mode right now

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sCl … ersion&iId=9396

I play them now again myself (1, 2, 3)

Can anyone comment on Wine for Windows?

The WineHQ wiki page here...
http://wiki.winehq.org/WineOnWindows
...seems to indicate it has problems and I haven't found a quick guide to it's usage,

I'm not sure that page has changed much at all in the last ten years. No one seems to care enough to get it working properly.

Jorpho wrote:

I'm not sure that page has changed much at all in the last ten years. No one seems to care enough to get it working properly.

Hrm, OK, so I guess I'd be looking at running a Linux distro and running Wine within it then. Maybe ReactOS is the easier route, even with it's deficiencies. Though ReactOS doesn't seem to support running DOS executable, so things that were mixed mode between x16 Windows and DOS don't work 😒. It also seems to fail to support x16 Windows Screensavers, which result in an "ERROR_BAD_EXE_FORMAT - <exe> is not a valid Windows32 application".

But that still involves multi booting. I still think that danoon's approach is the best, if there is anyone capable of taking it on.

Java Port

It would also address the 16-bit Win EXE on x64 problem.

Does anyone else find it ironic that it's often easier to run 30 year old software meant for completely different hardware (via emulation) than it is to play old Windows games that are half that age, on Windows?

Well, many of the internals of Windows are shrouded in mystery, such that programmers were able to get away with doing things the wrong way to a varying extent over the years. I like this blurb about the Windows Heap.

Rekrul wrote:

Does anyone else find it ironic that it's often easier to run 30 year old software meant for completely different hardware (via emulation) than it is to play old Windows games that are half that age, on Windows?

Windows has always been known as a clusterfuck in the programming community