what old games work with windows 10

[yogirlalyssa]

i am going to describe some old games that work with windows 10 and some that don't. if there's a game i didn't list feel free to ask me.

zoo tycoon - yes, zoo tycoon works with windows 10.
pinball - yes. i have seen people get it to work on windows 10.
pet vet - yes, but it requires wifi to play.
3 day eventing - no, this does not work with windows 10 unfortunately.
riding star - yes.
equiestraid 2001 - yes, but you have to lower your screen resolution in order for it to work.

have fun playing your old games!

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Hahaha. Nice.
There are just tooooo many PC games. You will have quite some work if you want to create a list (which probably exists already somewhere in some form).

Microsoft Windows has always been pretty good at supporting legacy software.

But we have some exceptions:

64 bit Windows dropped backwards compatibility for 16 bit applications. Unfortunately many games had installers which were already old when the games have been published → In some cases the main game is 32 bit, but the old installer not. That might be very bad if the installer has to extract some custom archive. I guess for the better known games third-party applications will exist to work around this.

Then there is aggressive disc based DRM. The actual game might work, possibly with some compatibility settings for high DPI monitors and fullscreen optimization (don't remember the actual term MS used), but the copy protection can be a big hurdle. Notably the very common SafeDisc with secrdv.sys driver is not working. I've read there are workarounds, but you should rather refrain from trying to get this rancid driver to work on productive Windows 10 systems.
Don't try to install games infected[sic!] with StarForce, especially versions designed for Windows XP. The good case would be Windows preventing the StarForce drivers from installing/loading. The bad case would be a dead Windows (which it did to my XP anyway once).
Older ProtectDISC versions might cause random bluescreens on newer Windows – also while NOT playing the game(s).

Anything using custom drivers to access optical drives can (and probably will) cause problems at some point.

I personally advise against using such disc based DRM infected games on productive systems. Either the copy protection will cause issues… or you have to resort to cracks, which are questionable in trustworthiness themselves.

 

[Kwyjor]

Yes, there are too many PC games, there are too many things that go wrong, and there are so very many fixes, patches, remakes, and so on. 64-bit compatibility and disc-based DRM were already problematic with Windows 7 (or even Vista).

These days, in many cases it's easiest just to install PCem or x86Box and run games under Win9x. Now, if there are things that won't run under PCem, that might be a useful list.

Not sure what the hardware demands for PCem are like these days, but even then there are alternatives like BoxedWine.

pet vet - yes, but it requires wifi to play.
3 day eventing - no, this does not work with windows 10 unfortunately.

I've never even heard of these games, nor can I imagine why a game would "require wifi" (of all things).