Depends on the program. I’ve got a handful of that old on CDs that still install fine. Checked when I was backing them up to ISO. There’s little bits of weirdness and unintended behavior while running them now, but they still install and run to a fairly acceptable degree.
That experience varies wildly though. Wine tends to handle things better and more consistently.
I’ve tried getting Windows XP games to run both in windows 7/10/11 and wine with little success. However, I have gotten them to work in Windows XP virtual machines.
Some of my favorite PC games come from the Windows XP era. There is something about games from that time that seem to make them particularly difficult to get running these days.
I’ve had the best luck in Linux via WINE/Proton, but it probably varies at lot from game to game.
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only “valid” for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.
Windows 11 won’t install those 25 year old programs anymore. Wine will.
Depends on the program. I’ve got a handful of that old on CDs that still install fine. Checked when I was backing them up to ISO. There’s little bits of weirdness and unintended behavior while running them now, but they still install and run to a fairly acceptable degree.
That experience varies wildly though. Wine tends to handle things better and more consistently.
I’ve tried getting Windows XP games to run both in windows 7/10/11 and wine with little success. However, I have gotten them to work in Windows XP virtual machines.
Some of my favorite PC games come from the Windows XP era. There is something about games from that time that seem to make them particularly difficult to get running these days.
I’ve had the best luck in Linux via WINE/Proton, but it probably varies at lot from game to game.
The problem I find with many games made for Win95/98/XP is that the game uses one or more third-party libraries that were only “valid” for a year or two. After that, updates to the OS closed loopholes that the poorly-written old versions of the libraries relied on, but the poorly-written newer versions of the libraries released to deal with those issues then break compatibility with the previously-released game, which was never updated or patched.