I'm used to having all my games on a separate drive or partition using steam or gog that is instantly picked up by the game client and then functioning in the OS. Now obviously you can install games to different drives and partitions on older operating systems like Windows 98, but are they actually portable? If I were to restore a clean Windows 98 install image to the system partition but leave my game partition/drive untouched, how can I get Windows 98 to see these games again? I know some games write stuff to the registry but maybe some don't? Would you have to also back up the registry and restore it somehow?

I have not completed my Windows 98 system yet so I'm wondering how other people go about this. Since I could potentially be using many different hardware configurations with many different driver configurations, thus prompting regular restores of a backup system image to test things, I would rather not have to mess with reinstalling games again.